ESCI: An End-to-End Spatiotemporal Correlation Integration Framework for Low-Observable Extended UAV Tracking with Cascade MIMO Radar Subject to Mixed Interferences

• Published in: Electronics (Basel) Vol. 14; no. 11; p. 2181
• Main Authors: Hu, Guanzheng, Fang, Xin, Huang, Darong, Zhang, Zhenyuan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.06.2025
• Subjects: Air transportation; Algorithms; Altitude; Continuous radiation; Correlation; Drone aircraft; Fourier transforms; Frequency modulation; Kinematics; Methods; MIMO communication; Probability distribution; Radar; Radar tracking; Signal processing; Tracking systems; Transportation systems; Unmanned aerial vehicles
• ISSN: 2079-9292; 2079-9292
• DOI: 10.3390/electronics14112181

Continuous and robust trajectory tracking of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) plays a crucial role in urban air transportation systems. Accordingly, this article presents an end-to-end spatiotemporal correlation integration (ESCI)-based UAV tracking framework by leveraging a high-resolution cascade multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar. On this account, a novel joint anti-interference detection and tracking system for weak extended targets is presented in this paper; the proposed method handles them jointly by integrating a continuous detection process into tracking. It not only eliminates the threshold decision-making process to avoid the loss of weak target information, but also significantly reduces the interference from other co-channel radars and strong clutters by exploring the spatiotemporal correlations within a sequence of radar frames, thereby improving the detectability of weak targets. In addition, to accommodate the time-varying number and extended size of radar reflections, with the ellipse spatial probability distribution model, the extended UAV with multiple scattering sources can be treated as an entity to track, and the complex measurement-to-object association procedure can be avoided. Finally, with Texas Instruments AWR2243 (TI AWR2243) we can utilize a cascade frequency-modulated continuous wave–multiple input multiple output (FMCW-MIMO) radar platform. The results show that the proposed method can obtain outstanding anti-interference performance for extended UAV tracking compared with state-of-the-art methods.