Adaptive pseudo‐spectrum based track‐before‐detect for targets with uncertain existence

Abstract

In the existing velocity filtering based track‐before‐detect (VF‐TBD), target existence is generally assumed to be constant, and multiple successive frames in a sliding window are jointly processed. However, when the target existence changes abruptly in a processing batch, the incorporation of noise‐only frames may corrupt target energy integration. This results in degraded detection and estimation performances with serious decision delays. A pseudo‐spectrum based VF‐TBD is proposed to effectively detect and track targets with existence uncertainty. An adaptive integration strategy is developed to realise effective energy accumulation with only informative frames by matching target appearance and disappearance times in addition to the velocity. The change of target existence can be discovered in time, and the decision delay is reduced. An estimation strategy based on the maximum output SNR is presented to supply accurate estimations of not only target motion parameters (including the position and velocity) but also time parameters (including appearance and disappearance times). The target output envelope, SNR gain and receiver operating characteristic curve of targets with uncertain existence are analysed theoretically. Numerical simulations exhibit the validity of the proposed method.