Multiple extended stealth target tracking from image observation based on non‐linear sub‐random matrices approach

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The detection and tracking of extended stealth targets (ESTs) is a challenging task in radar technology, especially if from image observations because of the fluctuations of radar cross section. To overcome this challenge, multi-Bernoulli (MB) filter can be used to extract the extended target (ET) states in efficient and reliable manner. Recently, the MB-filter-based random matrices model (RMM) approach has been proposed for ellipsoidal ET tracking with additional state variables. However, RMM-MB filter is demonstrated with known detection profile, which is unsuitable for EST tracking. Thus, a joint detection and tracking of multiple ESTs based on track-before-detect (TBD) approach, which is an efficient way to track low-observable ESTs, is proposed. In EST-RMM-TBD scenarios, although the extension ellipsoid is efficient, it may not be accurate because of some missing useful information, such as size, shape, and orientation. To address this, a EST-sub-RMM-TBD composed of sub-ellipses is introduced, each representing an RMM. Based on such models, a sub-RMM-MB-TBD filter is used to estimate the kinematic states and extensions of sub-objects for each EST. Furthermore, a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) implementation to estimate non-linear kinematic EST state is applied. The results indicate that the proposed SMC-sub-RMM-MB-TBD filter has more accurate cardinality estimation and smaller optimal sub-pattern assignment errors than the recent extended tracking filters.