A Particle Filter For Track-Before-Detect In Gsm Passive Coherent Location

This paper describes a Track-before-Detect method using a Particle Filter that operates on raw unthresholded sensor data provided by a Passive Coherent Location system using GSM signals as illuminators of opportunity. The classical approach of establishing tracks from preprocessed/thresholded data often fails to successfully track low SNR targets. By moving the detection step after a first tracking stage and hence virtually integrating and tracking raw sensor data over time weak targets previously hidden in noise can be successfully unmasked. The method is adapted to GSM signals and through simulations its potential is shown.