Track-Before-Detect Using an Airborne Multichannel Radar in the Maritime Domain

This article explores methods for the detection and tracking of maritime targets using an airborne scanning multichannel radar, operating at high altitudes. The main technical difficulties include 1) the nonstationary and non-Gaussian nature of sea clutter when using a high-resolution airborne radar and 2) low-target signal-to-interference ratios due to higher grazing angles. It is proposed to carry out processing in two stages. First, space-time adaptive processing (STAP) is applied to exploit the spatial and temporal degrees of freedom available in the multichannel radar. Subsequently, target detection and tracking is performed using the track-before-detect method, applied to the STAP output. For the sake of comparison, a more traditional tracking method is also developed, where a detection threshold is applied to the STAP output, to obtain point measurements, subsequently processed via an extended target tracking methodology. The error performance of the proposed methodology is presented, using high-fidelity radar data generation.