TARGET TRACKING IN THREE-DIMENSIONAL COORDINATES BY COMBINING RADAR AND IRST DATA

Abstract

Since the tracking of moving targets is a vital issue in military and civilian applications, aerospace industries are always looking for accurate, low-error, computationally light, and uncomplicated algorithms for target tracking. Today, most modern military systems are equipped with various sensors. The ideal operation of such sensors helps to realize target tracking. Due to the nature of the sensor system and the types of noises, one kind of sensor alone cannot be ideally used in target tracking. As a result, several different sensors are used in new systems for tracking. Radar systems are usually used to measure the angle and range of targets. Although they measure the range with high accuracy, radar systems cannot measure the target angle with proper accuracy. On the other hand, IRST data can measure the target angle with high accuracy and determine the direction of the target completely, but they do not provide special information about the target range. Providing a structure to integrate the information of these sensors facilitates the exact location of the target and also tracks the change of the target location. In this study, various structures for target tracking in 3D coordinates have been presented by combining radar data and IRST data. The results of target tracking with radar or IRST are very weak compared to the combination of radar and IRST. The performance of the SVF algorithm is favorable in terms of calculation speed and implementation complexity, as expected. Also, IRST-based tracking alone is expected to require less time and subsequently show poorer performance.