Alert-Confirm Track Confirmation for Radar

Alert-confirm detection is a refinement of sequential detection that has been popular for electronically-scanned-array radar since its discovery in the 1960s. The alert-confirm approach was adapted for track confirmation in a recent paper by the authors [1]. The purpose of this paper is to propose a further extension of the approach, adapted specifically to a radar model. Tentative tracks are formed on an alert detection. If the alert occurs within a specified range, the radar scan is interrupted and the hypothesised target is briefly tracked with a number of track-confirmation dwells. The track is confirmed if the track quality metric exceeds a threshold. Using the tracker operating characteristic for Integrated Probabilistic Data Association, also recently derived by the authors [2], which we apply here to a radar model, the performance of alert-confirm track-confirmation can be analysed and optimised. Our theoretical results are supported by numerical simulations.