An efficient track-before-detect for multi-PRF radars with range and doppler ambiguities

• Main Authors: Li, Wujun, Yi, Wei, Kong, Lingjiang, Teh, Kah Chan
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering; Radar Tracking; Radar
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/163763
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This article considers the detection and tracking of weak targets in multiple pulse repetition frequency (multi-PRF) radars using the track-before-detect (TBD) technique. By exploring the measurement independence among different PRFs, we decompose the joint multi-PRF and multiframe optimization problem into several lower dimensional maximizations, each of which corresponds to an intra-PRF multiframe processing. An efficient two-stage TBD procedure with a parallel structure is proposed for the multi-PRF radars. Specifically, in the first stage, a constraint inequality is derived analytically and used to decouple the measurement ambiguities from the nonlinear conversion relationship between polar and Cartesian coordinates. The intra-PRF multiframe integration can then be carried out concurrently using the ambiguous measurements and the target-like measurement plot sequences with different ambiguities are extracted for different PRFs. In the second stage, a covariance combination fusion-based inter-PRF joint disambiguation and estimation algorithm is proposed to solve the ambiguities of the plot sequences and output high-Accuracy target tracks. Simulation experiments show that the proposed algorithm can provide a good detection performance and higher tracking accuracy with much lower complexity.