Maneuvering Target Detection And Tracking In Skywave Over-the-Horizon Radar

The Skywave Over-the-Horizon Radar (OTHR), working in the HF band, has strong exterior noise. Furthermore, it's looking-down mode makes the return signal contains strong sea/ground clutter. For the detection and tracking of target, generally, coherent integration, which can be implemented by the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), is employed to achieve high Doppler resolution to distinguish the moving targets from the background clutter. The radial acceleration of maneuvering target may smear the Doppler spectrum when the FFT is used to achieve target Doppler information. In this situation, the detection and tracking of the target will be very difficult.The particle filter based detection and tracking algorithm for maneuvering target of the OTHR is presented in this paper. The particle filter is a recursive algorithm which is widely used in non-linear/non-Gaussian system. The theory of particle filter is introduced. The target state and observation models which are suitable for OTHR target detection and tracking is investigated in detail. The proposed algorithm can not only estimate the target state but also give the present probability of the target. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.