Polarization optimization in clutter background via target scattering estimation

The problem of designing the states of polarization (SOPs) of the transmitter and receiver in clutter background via target scattering estimation is discussed. Under the assumption that the covariance of the clutter and noise is known a prior, the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for the mean square error (MSE) of estimating the target is deduced. The problem of the minimizing MSE is converted to be a constrained optimization one. The paper solves this constrained optimization problem to optimally design the SOPs of the transmitter and the receiver. The performance of the proposed method is compared with conventional ones. Numerical results indicate that a significant amount of power gain is achieved in the target scattering estimation with the proposed method.