Particle-based track-before-detect in Rayleigh noise
Mark G. Rutten, Neil J. Gordon, Simon R. Maskell · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2004
Track-before-detect (TBD) refers to a tracking scheme where detection of a target is not made by placing a threshold on the sensor data. Rather, the complete sensor data is used to detect and track a target in the absence of a data threshold. By using all of the sensor data a TBD algorithm can detect and track targets which have a lower signal power than could be detected by using a standard detection and tracking scheme. This paper presents an efficient particle filter TBD algorithm, which models the signal processing stages which may be found in a sensor such as radar. In this type of sensor the noise is modelled as the magnitude of a complex Gaussian process, which is Rayleigh distributed. This noise model and the model of the sensor signal processing is incorporated into the filter derivation. It is shown that in a simple simulation the algorithm can detect and track targets with a signal-to-noise ratio as low as 3dB.