DA-PMHT for Multistatic Passive Radar Multitarget Tracking in Dense Clutter Environment

Multistatic passive radar exploits illuminators of opportunity such as radio or television stations for tracking airborne targets. This paper focuses on broadcast signals in a single frequency network modulated according to the digital audio/video broadcasting (DAB/DVB) standards. The main challenge is that one has to solve the measurement-to-illuminator association ambiguity in addition to the conventional measurement-to-target association ambiguity, which increases data association complexity greatly. In this paper, to solve the additional measurement-to-illuminator data association ambiguity, a novel deterministic annealing probabilistic multi-hypothesis tracker based on the extended Kalman filter is proposed. The proposed algorithm works directly in the original three-dimensional Cartesian space, and can efficiently handle a large number of association hypotheses among the targets, measurements, and illuminators in a natural way, also it is computationally attractive. As the angular measurement is not available or often of extremely poor quality, this paper assumes measurements of bistatic range and range rate and does not process bearing information. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm works reasonably well in dense clutter environment for multistatic passive radar system.