Maritime surveillance using multi-frequency HFSWR

In these decades, great interest has been directed toward high frequency surface wave radars (HFSWR) as long range early warning tools in maritime surveillance. But HFSWR exhibit some shortcomings that need to be taken into account when detecting targets, such as poor azimuth resolution and significant presence of clutter. This paper aims at showing a potential application of multi-frequency HFSW radars to detect ships with a better performance. Target detection, multi-target-tracking, and data fusion (DF) techniques are applied to experimental data collected during an HF-radar experiment, which took place between from August 26th 2009 to September 4th 2009 in the East China Sea. The system performance is defined in terms of time on target (ToT), track fragmentation, tracking area and accuracy. DF of the multiple frequency data improves ToT and accuracy significantly. The effectiveness of the tracking procedures is also shown in comparison to the radar detection algorithm.