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

• Published in: IEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing Vol. 60; pp. 1 - 20
• Main Authors: Joshi, Sushil Kumar, Baumgartner, Stefan V., Krieger, Gerhard
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Airborne radar; Airborne remote sensing; Airborne sensing; Algorithms; Clutter; Domains; Doppler sonar; Marine vehicles; maritime safety; Multiple target tracking; Radar; Radar antennas; Radar cross sections; Radar data; radar detections; Radar tracking; SAR (radar); Security; Surveillance systems; Synthetic aperture radar; Target tracking
• ISSN: 0196-2892; 1558-0644
• DOI: 10.1109/TGRS.2021.3084862

Ship tracking facilitates a comprehensive insight into maritime traffic situations and ensures its safety and security. However, with the current operational surveillance systems, detecting several maritime threats is still a major challenge. In this article, we propose a supportive ship tracking concept using an airborne-based radar sensor. The proposed tracking algorithm is suitable for dense multitarget scenarios. Tracking is performed in the range-Doppler domain. The primary advantage of using the 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. In addition, a powerful track management system is also developed to handle false targets. The simulated and real experimental results from the DLR's airborne radar sensors, F-SAR and DBFSAR, are presented to prove the concept.