The Air Force and DARPA have devoted an enormous effort to the data acquisition, signal processing, and signature exploitation of stationary and moving ground targets as seen from airborne radar sensors. This previous work has, for the most part, concentrated on conventional radar modes and well established target signature features. However, to our knowledge, the research community has not looked at first principles of radar mode design to understand how the radar mode can be set up to optimally produce signature derived information for battlefield intelligence objectives. The objective of this research program is to investigate this fundamental question and understand how radar modes can be designed to optimally produce signature derived information for satisfying battlefield intelligence objectives. In this work we will extend the scope of previous work in signature exploitation and consider higher level battlefield intelligence objectives while, at the same time, optimizing the radar mode characteristics for satisfying those intelligence objectives. Commercial benefits of the proposed research include all applications of detection and identification of moving and stationary targets using high resolution radar systems. These applications include detection and tracking of planes and ground vehicles at airports for safety purposes, detecting and tracking of cars and trucks on highways for track flow analysis and safety, detection and tracking of intruders and non-intruders for building surveillance, detection and tracking of cargo handlers (fork lifts, trucks, people) in large, congested warehouse environments for safety and efficiency, and detection and tracking moving parts within a manufacturing plant for monitoring and controlling the manufacturing process. We anticipate that the need to track and identify a large number of targets in a diverse set of environments (like those mentioned above) will grow significantly as the adaptive signal and array processing capability inproves to the point that clutter and interference are effectively mitigated and target parameters can be reliably estimated. The benefit of such a capability will impact all the commercial applications discussed above simply by making such a capability a reality.
