Electromagnetic vector sensors and active target localization and identification

A new model for actively localizing and identifying targets using electromagnetic vector sensors is developed and analyzed. Target dependent variables are introduced that provide a natural parametrization of the statistics of the target's reflection characteristics (scattering matrix) to arbitrarily polarized transmitted signals. Cramer-Rao bounds on the variance of unbiased estimators of these parameters are derived to show how an estimator's expected performance depends on the target's state and the transmitted signal. The parameters are shown to have physical interpretations and to represent characteristics intrinsic to the target.<<ETX>>