Centralized Fusion of Radar and IRST on an Aircraft

This paper presents a centralized sensor fusion approach for radar and an infrared search and track (IRST) system mounted on an aircraft. The target motion is modelled in relative kinematics with radar measuring range, azimuth and elevation while IRST measures only target line of sight direction of arrival. A detailed sensor fusion architecture is presented for target tracking and the performance of the same is analyzed in the simulation environment. The sensor operational modes viz. track while scan (TWS) and single target tracking (STT) modes of radar and IRST are analyzed and target tracking performance is presented. Further, Monte Carlo simulations are carried out and root mean squared error analysis has been used to analyze the proposed centralized sensor fusion algorithm.