Joint detection and tracking of unresolved targets with a joint-bin processing monopulse radar - art. no. 62360T

Detection and estimation of multiple unresolved targets with a monopulse radar is limited by the availability of information in monopulse signals. The maximum possible number of targets that can be extracted from the monopulse signals of a single bin is two. Recently two approaches have been proposed in the literature to overcome this limitation. The first is joint-bin processing that exploits target spill-over among adjacent cells by modeling the target returns in the adjacent cells. In addition to making use of the additional information available in target spill-over, it handles a more practical problem where the usual assumption of ideal sampling is relaxed. The second approach is to make use of tracking information in detection through joint detection and tracking with the help of Monte Carlo integration of a particle filter. It was shown that the extraction of even more targets is possible with tracking information. In this paper, a new approach is proposed to combine make the best of these two approaches - a new joint detection and tracking algorithm with multibin processing. The proposed method increases the detection ability as well as tracking accuracy. Simulation studies are carried out. with amplitude comparison monopulse radar for an unresolved target scenario. The relative performances of various methods are also provided.