Tracking and Track Management of Extended Targets in Range-Doppler using Range-Compressed Airborne Radar Data

Abstract

Ship tracking facilitates a comprehensive insight of maritime traffic situation and ensures its safety and security. However, with the current operational surveillance systems detecting several maritime threats is still a major challenge. In this paper we propose a supportive ship tracking concept using an airborne based radar sensor. The proposed tracking algorithm is suitable for dense multi-target scenarios. Tracking is performed in the range-Doppler domain. The primary advantage of using range-Doppler domain is that ships even with low radar cross section moving with certain line-of-sight velocity appear out of the clutter region, thus improving their detectability. Additionally, a powerful track management system is also developed to handle false targets. Simulated and real experimental results from the DLR’s airborne radar sensors F-SAR and DBFSAR are presented to prove the concept.