Waveform Synthesis for Active Sensing with Emerging Applications

Throughout the history of mankind, we have sought ways and means to extend the boundaries of our sensory system with the help of science and technology. Active sensing systems have played a vital role in the advancement of human civilization--- in navigation, communication, system identification, defense, energy cultivation, meteorology, space exploration, etc It is well known that a judicious design of the transmit signals improves the performance of an active sensing system by enhancing the target detection and estimation capability by manyfold. This thesis is concerned with synthesizing waveforms for smart active sensing systems of forthcoming decades, viz, (i) improved system identification and (ii) advanced radar systems. Several problems of signal optimization in the context of practical scenarios have been considered. The associated problems are studied and several novel algorithms are proposed and supported by several numerical examples.