In cognitive radar systems (CRSs), target scattering coefficients (TSC) can be utilized to improve the performance of target identification and classification. This work considers the problem of TSC estimation for temporally correlated target. Multiple receive antennas are adopted to receive the echo waveforms, which are interfered by the signal-dependent clutter. Unlike existing estimation methods in time domain, a novel estimation method based on Kalman filtering (KF) is proposed in frequency domain to exploit the temporal TSC correlation, and reduce the complexity of subsequent waveform optimization. Additionally, to minimize the mean square error of estimated TSC at each KF iteration, in contrary to existing works, we directly model the design process as an optimization problem, which is non-convex and cannot be solved efficiently. Therefore, we propose a novel method, similar in some way to semi-definite programming (SDP), to convert the non-convex problem into a convex one. Simulation results demonstrate that the estimation performance can be significantly improved by the KF estimation with optimized waveform.

In this paper, we consider the problem of waveform optimization for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) radar in the presence of signal-dependent noise. A novel diagonal loading (DL) based method is proposed to optimize the waveform covariance matrix (WCM) for minimizing the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) which improves the performance of parameter estimation. The resulting nonlinear optimization problem is solved by resorting to a convex relaxation that belongs to the semidefinite programming (SDP) class. An optimal solution to the initial problem is then constructed through a suitable approximation to an optimal solution of the relaxed one (in a least squares (LS) sense). Numerical results show that the performance of parameter estimation can be improved considerably by the proposed method compared to uncorrelated waveforms.