Range-Doppler Tracking of Ships using Single-Channel Airborne Radar Data

Abstract:
Ship tracking is important to ensure maritime safety and security. However, with the state-of-the-art sensors and systems detecting several maritime threats is still a very challenging task. In this paper, a supportive ship tracking concept using range-compressed (RC) airborne radar data is proposed. Ships are tracked in the range-Doppler domain where the ships moving with certain line-of-sight velocity appear out of the clutter region, thus improving their detectability. Ship tracking in high resolution data is an extended target tracking problem, therefore the extracted centroids of the detected and clustered ships are tracked over time. A powerful track management system is also developed for recognizing and terminating the false targets. Simulated and real experimental results from the DLR’s F-SAR and DBFSAR system are provided to prove the concept.