Cognitive radar for ground moving target imaging

In future decades there will be a growing demand for multi-function radar systems operating in resource-constrained and congested and contested spectrum environment. Due to the complexity of several missions, radar systems are required to perform multiple functions simultaneously, such as surveillance, clutter/interference cancellation, moving target detection (MTD), imaging and recognition. This leads to the development of multichannel, multi-static, multi-frequency and multi-polarization, in a single word, multi-dimensional, radar systems which enrich the received signal information content and increase the degrees of freedom that can be used to perform the above-mentioned radar tasks. Such systems need to share the spectrum with other concurrent and contrasting systems and, therefore, must be able to adapt to the environmental conditions. Moreover, to meet demanding requirements and to reduce costs, size and weight, modern radar systems should share the same hardware and software with other systems. In light of recent developments in the matter of cognitive radar, recent radar demonstrators and prototypes have started to embrace this new technology as it provides the best performances in dynamically changing environments. As it happens in the human brain, as well as in other mammals, a cognitive radar system learns about the environment through the interaction with it and acts consequently by transmitting optimal wave-forms and adopting optimal signal processing on receive. This process can be considered the core of a cognitive system. The concept of cognition has been introduced and extended to radar systems for the first time by Simon Haykin in 2006. One of Haykin's citations is emblematic of the concept of cognitive systems.