Abstract
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.
Highlights
M ARITIME transport is considered as the backbone of international trade and the world economy
State-of-the-art sensors that are used for maritime traffic situational awareness are the automatic identification system (AIS) [2] and marine radars [3]–[5]
A two-day F-synthetic aperture radar (SAR) flight campaign was conducted in June 2016 in the North Sea
Summary
M ARITIME transport is considered as the backbone of international trade and the world economy. The available algorithms for such platforms were originally designed for tracking road vehicles [15] They use low range-resolution data where the vehicles of interest, in most cases, occupy not more than a single resolution cell. The target tracks in the range-Doppler domain are needed for the following. This article proposes a novel range-Doppler-based tracking algorithm for tracking multiple extended targets using RC airborne radar data. To validate the proposed range-Doppler-based tracking algorithm, the simulated and real linearly and circularly acquired experimental data from DLR’s (German Aerospace Center) airborne F-SAR [21] and DBFSAR [22] system are presented.
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