A Tracking System Exploiting Interaction Between a Detector With Localization Capabilities and the KF

In the present paper, we focus on the design of a Kalman-based algorithm to track a single target in range. The proposed approach exploits spillover of target energy between consecutive matched filter samples; to this end, at the kth scan, a GLRT-based detector is fed by the predicted target position (computed by the tracker using measurements up to the (k - 1)th scan) and returns to the tracker an estimate of the current target position (measurement) obtained by taking into account target strength over consecutive samples. We assume that the target echo is known up to a complex deterministic parameter; moreover, we suppose that the target is embedded in white Gaussian noise with unknown power. The performance analysis is conducted in comparison to a more conventional Kalman-based tracker that interpolates consecutive samples to take advantage of the spillover. Remarkably, the proposed estimation scheme can provide accurate estimates of the target position within the cell under test.