A Bayesian track management scheme for improved multi‐target tracking and classification in drone surveillance radar

Abstract

Abstract In this article, a simple, yet effective, Bayesian scheme for tracks maintenance, promotion, and deletion in drone surveillance radar is presented. It enables the simultaneous tracking of the target body and micro‐Doppler components that originate from the motion of rotors (if any) onboard an unmanned air system. This not only delivers more accurate multi‐target tracking, but also substantially improves the radar automatic target classification capability (e.g. discriminating between drone and non‐drone targets). Challenging and diverse real staring radar datasets are used here to demonstrate the efficacy and benefits of the proposed track management approach.

Keywords

• autonomous aerial vehicles
• Kalman filters
• micro Doppler
• multi‐target tracking
• radar
• radar target recognition