Joint detection and tracking of non‐ellipsoidal extended targets based on cubature Kalman‐CBMeMBer sub‐random matrices filter
Mohamed Barbary, Mohamed Hassan Abd Elazeem · IET Image Processing · 2020
Joint detection and tracking of multiple extended targets (ETs) from image observations is a challenging radar technology; especially for extended stealth targets (ESTs). This work provides a new approach for the ESTs tracking under the non‐linear Gaussian system based on track‐before‐detect (TBD) approach. The sequential Monte Carlo cardinality‐balanced multi‐target multi‐Bernoulli (SMC‐CBMeMBer) filter provides a good framework to cope with TBD approach. However, this filter suffers from the particles’ degradation problem seriously; especially for ETs tracking. Recently, the cubature Kalman (CK)‐CBMeMBer filter which employs a third‐degree spherical‐radical cubature rule has been proposed to handle the non‐linear models, the CK‐CBMeMBer filter is more accurate and more principled in mathematical terms compared to SMC‐CBMeMBer filter. To this point, the authors address a TBD of ESTs with extended CK‐CBMeMBer filter based on random matrix model (RMM), which is an efficient way to track ellipsoidal ESTs. In RMM‐ESTs scenarios, although the extension ellipsoid is efficient, it may not be accurate enough because of lacking useful information, such as size, shape, and orientation. Therefore, they introduce a filter composed of sub‐ellipses; each one is represented by a RMM. The results confirm the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed filter.