Extended Target Tracking with a Photonics-Based Radar on a Packaged Silicon Chip

This paper reports the latest advancements on the signal processing for a recently presented photonics-based radar, whose transceiver has been developed on a silicon chip. The proposed system offers the opportunity to address the problem of extended target tracking, which entails not only the estimation of targets’ kinematics, but also of their size.The signal processing chain consists of a pixel-wise detection strategy followed by the joint probabilistic data association rule in combination with the unscented Kalman filter. Performance assessment is carried out on real X-band radar data acquired by the system close to the Port of Livorno, Italy. By comparison with navigation data provided through the automatic identification system, the experimental results demonstrate that the processing chain is able to grant good tracking performance requiring limited computational effort.