An Improved Two-Stage Based Multi-frame Track-Before-Detect Algorithm in Radar systems

The detection and tracking of dim targets in complex environments show great importance in radar systems. The track-before-detect (TBD) technology has been widely researched in the scenario where the target signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is low, however, there has been no suitable solution to the trade-off between tracking accuracy and computational complexity during the process of multi-frame joint detection in radar systems. In this paper, we propose an efficient two-stage based multi-frame detection and tracking algorithm in radar systems. The proposed algorithm consists of a low threshold pre-processing stage, and a TBD processor, which searches possible target tracks from multiple scans and declares the final estimated tracks. The proposed algorithm provides an accurate evolution of target states over time in polar coordinates to avoid the performance loss and model mismatch due to the nonlinear conversion in mixed coordinates. In addition, we further propose a greedy-based recursive algorithm to implement fast track formation from the over-threshold multi-frame measurement points. Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves a better detection and tracking performance with a low computational complexity.