Adaptive Receive Processing of Spatially Modulated Physical Radar Emissions

Inspired by the fixational movements of the human eye, fast-time spatial modulation was recently demonstrated as a particular physically realizable form of a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar emission. The attendant coupling of the delay and angle dimensions has been shown to provide a modest improvement in spatial separation, even when using non-adaptive pulse compression and beamforming. Here this continuous emission paradigm is appropriately discretized and a joint delay-angle adaptive filtering strategy is developed that exploits the physical waveform-diverse emission structure to realize significant enhancement in target separability.