A FEHT algorithm for detecting and tracking VLO targets

In order to address the problem of detecting and tracking very low observable (VLO) targets in heavy clutter, a fast ergodic Hough transform (FEHT) algorithm is proposed. The contributions consist of three aspects. First, the FEHT does not invoke a random combination but rather an ergodic combination of all possible measurement pairs to generate the line parameters, which avoids the failure detection due to random sampling. Second, a joint gate is proposed to reject the measurement pairs with negligible probability, and hence reduce the computational and storage burden. Third, the computation complexity of the proposed method is analyzed. Simulation results shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.