In many tracking applications, and particularly those in ballistic missile defense, one concern involves the continuous tracking of an object that separates into two objects. Reliable tracking without track breaks demands early recognition of such a split, preferably well in advance of the two objects becoming resolvable by the radar. In previous work, signal processing techniques for detecting the presence of unresolved objects and angle-of-arrival estimation for unresolved targets have been developed for monopulse radars. In this paper, these techniques are reviewed and extended. Techniques for detecting the presence of unresolved objects are treated for the case of idealized resolution, in which all of the energy for a target is returned in a single range resolution sample or cell. The approaches work solely on monopulse angle statistics and rely on idealized range resolution. The requirement for idealized range resolution is relaxed by using joint statistics with adjacent matched filter returns. The AOA estimation and detection of the presence of unresolved objects for non-ideal resolution are then addressed. The performances are demonstrated using a high fidelity software simulation tool for target tracking.

Date Published: 5 January 2004
PDF: 13 pages
Proc. SPIE 5204, Signal and Data Processing of Small Targets 2003, (5 January 2004); doi: 10.1117/12.513630

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5204:
Signal and Data Processing of Small Targets 2003
Oliver E. Drummond, Editor(s)