Tracking in the presence of RGPO or VGPO using the Kalman filter with a new modified PDA

Abstract

The range gate pull off (RGPO) and the velocity gate pull off (VGPO) are two kinds of common electronic countermeasure techniques used to defeat or degrade tracking radars. For countering the RGPO or VGPO, the extended Kalman filter (EKF) with a new modified probabilistic data association (PDA) is proposed in this paper. It takes full advantage of the fact that for the case of low measurement noise, the measurements for the RGPO/VGPO have virtually the same Doppler velocity/range as those of the true target. This method uses the difference between the Doppler velocity and tracking velocity of the Kalman filter to weight the probability of every measurement so that less weight is given to the false measurement. The simulations show that for the case of low measurement noise, the EKF method with the new modified PDA can counter the RGPO or VGPO, and works better than the EKF with the standard PDA.