Two-Dimensional Viterbi Track-Before-Detect Algorithm for Dim Object Tracking
Mateusz Zwolak, Michał Boruch, Przemysław Mazurek · 2025
Tracking UAVs is a difficult task because they are often very small objects, but very important from the point of view of airspace safety. Due to the size, which can be one pixel in the image and various sources of noise, it can be lost in the background noise. Using conventional methods based on detection and tracking is then not possible. However, using TBD (Track-Before-Detect) algorithms, this can be done at the cost of high computational cost. The article proposes a solution using the Viterbi decoder to track a single UAV based on a sequence of images. The detection possibilities are shown as an example. Empirical studies were conducted to estimate the computational cost for the implementation using the matrix-based implementation of the algorithm using Matlab™software. The obtained results show the possibility of implementing a TBD system working in real time.