Introduction to Radar Signal & Data Processing: The Opportunity

This paper introduces to the lecture series dedicated to the knowledge-based radar signal and data processing. Knowledge-based expert system (KBS) is in the realm of artificial intelligence. KBS consists of a knowledge base containing information specific to a problem domain and an inference engine that employs reasoning to yield decisions. KBS have been built: some are very complex with thousands rules while others, relatively simple, are designed to tackle very specialised tasks. This lecture series shows that KBS can be successfully applied to radar systems. This paper introduces the Reader to the world of radar and, specifically, to the topics tackled in the subsequent lectures of the series. The paper starts with an introduction (Section 2) to radar (radar evolution from the early days up today, taxonomy of radar and radar equation). Subsequently, Section 3 considers the schematic of a modern radar system. The phased-array radar is the theme of Section 4. Signal processing, one of the main building blocks of modern radar, is introduced in Section 5. The section also introduces to the various forms of adaptivity in time, space and space-time domains for natural and intentional interference mitigation. Data processing, mainly target tracking, (Section 6) is the other relevant building block of radar. An extensive list of references (Section 9) is helpful to the Reader for a deeper insight to the many interesting topics of radar.