Particle filter for manoeuvring target tracking via passive radar measurements with glint noise

Abstract

This study investigates the problem of manoeuvring target tracking with passive coherent location (PCL) radar. The main challenge stems from the non-linearities of the dynamic state space and the non-Gaussian measurement noise. The contribution of the study is twofold. First, to deal with the problem of manoeuvring target tracking in the presence of glint noise, an interacting multiple model (IMM) particle filtering (PF) method using multiple time-of-arrival (TOA) measurements from several transmitter–receiver pairs are proposed and evaluated. Second, because tracking precision is sensitive to the configuration of transmitters and receiver stations, the authors provide insight into the influence of the configuration of transmitters and receiver stations on the tracking methods of PCL radar. Simulations illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with conventional IMM algorithm and PF algorithm in different glint noise environments and various configurations of transmitters and receiver stations, the proposed method obtains better estimates of position, velocity and acceleration.