Joint Detection and Tracking for Compact HFSWR

Due to reduced aperture size of the receiving antenna array and low transmit power, compact high-frequency surface wave radar suffers from low positioning accuracy and low detection probability, which raises challenges to target detection and tracking. Under such circumstances, traditional detection before tracking methods in which one-way information transmission from the detector to the tracker is used often lead to false tracking and track fragmentation due to missed detections and interferences. To address this problem, a joint detection and tracking processing framework which realizes a two-way target information transmission between the detector and tracker is proposed in this paper. Experimental results using field data show that the average tracking time on target obtained by the proposed method is 17.5 minutes longer than that of the detection before tracking method. The plot-to-track association accuracy and target tracking continuity is significantly improved.