Design of Pareto-Optimal Radar Receive Filters

This paper deals with the design of radar receive filters jointly optimized with respect to sidelobe energy and sidelobe peaks via Pareto-optimal theory. We prove that this criterion is tantamount to jointly minimizing two quadratic forms, so that the design can be analytically formulated in terms of a multi-objective optimization problem. In order to solve it, we resort to the scalarization technique, which reduces the vectorial problem into a scalar one using a Pareto weight defining the relative importance of the two objective functions. At the analysis stage, we assess the performance of the receive filters in correspondence of different values of the Pareto weight highlighting the performance compromises between the Integrated Sidelobe Level (ISL) and the Peak Sidelobe Level (PSL).