Bernoulli track‐before‐detect smoothing for maritime radar

Abstract

Detection and tracking of small targets in sea clutter using a high-resolution radar is a challenging problem as the sea surface constantly moves in a complex manner, with rough seas creating strong target-like returns. Recently, a Bernoulli track-before-detect (TBD) filter has been developed for an airborne scanning radar in the maritime domain. Its purpose is to detect and track short-exposure targets by using the radar in a fast scanning mode. The current paper investigates the potential improvement in detection and tracking performance of the Bernoulli TBD filter by incorporating a backward smoothing step. The developed algorithm, referred to as the Bernoulli TBD forward-backward smoother (FBS) for maritime radar, is making a delayed decision by taking into account multiple future scans of radar data. A numerical analysis of a joint detection and tracking error with a fixed-lag smoothing is presented, as a function of the number of delay lags, signal-to-interference ratio and the sea clutter spikiness.

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

“…The current TBD approaches can be classified into two groups: the single frame recursive TBD [12][13][14][15] and the multi-frame or batch style TBD (MF-TBD) [16][17][18]. Typical recursive TBD algorithms include particle filtering based TBD [19,20] and random finite set methods [21,22]. Dynamic programming based TBD (DP-TBD) [23][24][25], Hough transformation based TBD (HT-TBD) [26,27], maximum likelihood-probabilistic data association (ML-PDA) [28,29] and velocity filtering based TBD (VF-TBD) [30][31][32] belong to MF-TBD.…”

Track‐Before‐Resolving: Doppler ambiguity resolution at low SNR

“…In recent years, Track-Before-Detection (TBD) has become an effective method to capture a small Radar Cross-Section (RCS) target like a stealth object [1][2][3][4]. It employs the tracking filters before detection to improve detection performance for low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) targets.…”