Tracking and Track Management of Extended Targets in Range-Doppler Using Range-Compressed Airborne Radar Data

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.