TABLE OF CONTENTS G. V. Trunk
Naval Research Laboratory
Since the invention of radar, radar operators have detected and tracked targets by using visual inputs from a variety of displays. Although operators can perform these tasks very accurately, they are easily saturated and quickly become fatigued. Various studies have shown that operators can manually track only a few targets. To correct this situation, automatic detection and tracking (ADT) systems were attached to many radars. As digital processing increases in speed and hardware decreases in cost and size, ADT systems will become associated with almost all but the simplest radars.
In this chapter, automatic detection, automatic tracking, and sensor integration systems for air surveillance radar will be discussed. Included in this discussion are various noncoherent integrators that provide target enhancement, thresholding techniques for reducing false alarms and target suppression, and algorithms for estimating target position and resolving targets. Then, an overview of the entire tracking system is given, followed by a discussion of its various components such as tracking filter, maneuver-following logic, track initiation, and correlation logic. Next, multiscan approaches to automatic tracking such as maximum likelihood are discussed. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion of sensor integration and radar netting, including both colocated and multisite systems.
The statistical framework necessary for the development of automatic detection was applied to radar in the 1940s by Marcum,1 and later Swerling2 extended the work to fluctuating targets. They investigated many of the statistical problems associated with the noncoherent detection of...
