Cruise missiles over land and sea cluttered background are serious threats to search and track systems. In general, these threats are stealth in both the IR and radio frequency bands. That is, their thermal IR signature and their radar cross section can be quite small. This paper discusses adaptive sequential detection methods which exploit 'track-before-detect' technology for detection low-SNR targets in IR search and track (IRST) systems. Despite the fact that we focus on an IRST against cruise missiles over land and sea cluttered backgrounds, the results are applicable to other sensors and other kinds of targets. The developed algorithms allow us to detect a priori unknown number of targets that appear and disappear at unknown points in time. In contrast to the traditional Wald's method the problem of detection of a target with unknown moment of appearance is formulated and solved as a quickest detection problem (change-point detection problem). This problem involves optimization of a trade-off between the detection delay and the false alarm rate. The developed sequential algorithm detects a target with as small average delay as possible (after it appears) under the constraint on the frequency of false alarms. In addition, the algorithm detects target disappearance-also with the smallest delay, which makes it possible to almost immediately interrupt tracking when the target disappears. The decision statistics use the results of 'track-before-detect'-the estimates of a target's spatial location based on the optimal spatial-temporal nonlinear filtering. Simulation results using real (starring) IRST data are presented. These results show that performance is high even for very low SNR targets.
Adaptive sequential algorithms for detecting targets in a heavy IR clutter
1999
12 Seiten, 25 Quellen
Conference paper
English
6.0205 An Efficient Adaptive Sequential Procedure for Detecting Targets
British Library Conference Proceedings | 2002
|Two CFAR Algorithms for Interfering Targets and Nonhomogeneous Clutter
Online Contents | 1993
|