Frequency-hopping code optimization for radar coincidence imaging by exploiting the dictionary matrix

Radar coincidence imaging (RCI) is a high-resolution staring imaging technique, which is fit for sparse recovery natively. The performance of RCI depends on the coherence property of dictionary matrix. In this paper, RCI using frequency-hopping (FH) waveforms is considered, and a FH code design method optimizing the dictionary matrix is introduced. First, the waveform optimization object function minimizing the difference between the correlation matrix and identity matrix is derived. Then, the quantum simulated annealing (QSA) is employed to optimize the FH code. Numerical simulations show that the optimized FH code could improve the imaging performance of RCI.