In this chapter, we describe a cognitive radar that mimics the visual brain [1]. Although the visual brain and radar are different in that the visual brain does not transmit a probing signal to the environment, while the active radar greatly relies on the probing signal it transmits to the environment; nevertheless, both of them are observers of the surrounding environment. As such, there is much that we can learn from the visual brain in building a new generation of cognitive radars that outperform traditional radars. In this chapter, we confine the discussion, in both analytic and experimental terms, to cognitive radar aimed at target tracking.

Chapter Contents:

• 2.1 Introduction
• 2.2 Fuster's paradigm of cognition
• 2.3 Engineering perspective of cognition
• 2.4 Perception—action cycle
• 2.4.1 Bayesian filtering for optimal perception in the receiver
• 2.4.2 Shannon's entropy vs. Fisher information
• 2.4.3 Posterior Cramér—Rao lower bound
• 2.4.4 Sensitivity analysis
• 2.4.5 Dynamic programming for control in the transmitter
• 2.5 Memory
• 2.5.1 Perceptual memory
• 2.5.2 Executive memory
• 2.5.3 Working memory
• 2.6 Attention
• 2.7 Intelligence
• 2.8 Cyclic-directed information flow
• 2.8.1 Perceptual pathway
• 2.8.2 Executive pathway
• 2.8.3 How can we build on the directed information-flow graph to better understand the role of memory in cognition?
• 2.9 Experimental groundwork
• 2.9.1 State-space model
• 2.9.2 Construction of the two libraries
• 2.9.3 Performance metric
• 2.9.4 Track initialization
• 2.9.5 Memory
• 2.10 Experimental results: theoretical considerations
• 2.10.1 Posterior Cramér—Rao lower bound
• 2.10.2 Tracking accuracy
• 2.11 Experimental results: practical considerations
• 2.12 Conclusion
• References

Inspec keywords: radar tracking; brain; target tracking; cognitive radio

Other keywords: probing signal; target tracking; cognitive radar; visual brain

Subjects: Radio links and equipment; Radar equipment, systems and applications; Signal processing and detection