Direct tracking of multiple targets in MIMO radar

We consider the problem of tracking multiple moving targets by MIMO radar systems with widely distributed antennas and non-coherent processing. Two tracking algorithms based on the extended Kalman filter are proposed to estimate locations and velocities of multiple targets. With indirect tracking, the tracker observations model consists of time delay and velocity estimates and nearest-neighbor data association, whereas direct tracking is performed on the radar observations, and data association is implicit. The analysis shows that for multiple targets, direct tracking outperforms indirect tracking at all signal-to-noise ratio values. The advantage of direct tracking is traced to the elimination of intermediate estimated parameters and explicit data association.