  Range profiling refers to the measurement of target response along the radar
slant range. It plays an important role in automatic target recognition. In
this paper, we consider the design of transmit waveform to improve the range
profiling performance of radar systems. Two design metrics are adopted for the
waveform optimization problem: one is to maximize the mutual information
between the received signal and the target impulse response (TIR); the other is
to minimize the minimum mean-square error for estimating the TIR. In addition,
practical constraints on the waveforms are considered, including an energy
constraint, a peak-to-average-power-ratio constraint, and a spectral
constraint. Based on minorization-maximization, we propose a unified
optimization framework to tackle the constrained waveform design problem.
Numerical examples show the superiority of the waveforms synthesized by the
proposed algorithms.
