Joint Estimation of Unresolved Leader-Follower in the Presence of Dense False Signals Using Monopulse Radar

Monopulse radar accurately determines the target direction. However, multiple target echoes and dense false signals lead to unresolved targets and false detections. This makes target tracking challenging. The aircraft is equipped with a towed radar active decoy at a fixed distance, forming the leader-follower configuration. This article treats the aircraft and the decoy as a single target in the Bayesian state model. Subsequently, constraints from the configuration are employed to jointly estimate their angles. Monopulse measurements from the leader-follower configuration are a mixture of potentially unresolved measurement, dense false signals, and background clutter, and they are modeled as target area measurements, state-dependent clutter, and state-independent clutter, respectively. Subsequently, these different measurement types are combined using a random finite set approach, enabling a holistic tracking solution. The proposed method is implemented by particle filtering. In the simulations, the proposed method was compared with other methods and found to be efficient in tracking unresolved aircraft and towed decoy. The results indicate that the performance of the method improves as the follower-to-leader ratio increases within a certain range, highlighting its suitability for practical applications.