Real time Hough transform based track initiators in clutter

In both military and civilian surveillance systems such as Air Traffic Control (ATC) systems, tracking targets in clutter using radar involves dealing with a number of challenges, all related to real time decision and data fusion theories. A major challenge is to detect the real targets through the received measurements in real time and to activate the tracking process. This paper deals with real time automatic initiation of tracks in clutter. Among the proposed solutions in the literature to handle this problem, the conventional Hough transforms (HT) and the Modified Hough Transforms (MHT) have been shown to be effective as track initiator techniques in dense clutter. However, these techniques are computationally intensive. Inasmuch as the tracking of targets is a real time application, we propose in this work, to modify both the Hough transforms (HT) and the Modified Hough Transforms (MHT) so that they can work in real time in adverse environments. The resulting techniques are called Real Time HT (RTHT) and Real Time MHT (RTMHT). Monte Carlo simulations are used to assess the performance of the proposed techniques. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.