Information Theory Based Radar Signature Analysis

The ability to make radar signature databases portable for use within similar sensor systems is critical to the affordability of airborne signature exploitation systems. The capability to hybridize measured and synthetic signature database components will maximize the investment required to build complex radar signature databases. Radar target scattering response signatures and sensor related effects can be modeled and analyzed as a random process to enable sensor optimization. Information theory based methods are proposed as a means to identify those components within the signal subspace that are highly linked to target separability. Mutual information is developed as a measure of similarity to compare measured field data to modeled synthetic data. The approach is demonstrated using synthetic signature sets comprised of both "similar targets" and "dissimilar targets".