Pulse compression is often used in radar to increase the detection range while suppressing the peak transmission power and to prevent a drop in the range resolution. However, a drawback of this technique is the target range is observed offset by an amount proportional to the range rate of the target. On the other hand, various α–β filters have been derived based on the differences in motion models. These filters define the process noise in a discrete system in terms of the velocity, the acceleration, or the n‐th derivative of the acceleration, or discretized after defining the process noise in a continuous system in terms of the acceleration. For the process noise in a discrete system defined in terms of the acceleration, we propose an α–β filter that tracks while internally correcting the bias observation error described above. In this paper, we show a necessary and sufficient stability condition of various stable α–β filters that track while internally correcting the bias observation error. We show that the stable gain region does not depend on the Doppler shift time constant and is invariant. Then we formulate the relationship between α and β and the error covariance matrix. In addition, for α–β filters where the process noise in a discrete system is defined in terms of the velocity or the acceleration, or where the process noise in a continuous system is defined in terms of the acceleration and then discretized, we showed that, in practice, the α–β filter with the process noise defined in terms of the velocity in discrete time, has superior performance, when the performance is measured in terms of error covariance matrix given a fixed maneuver index. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 87(6): 13–22, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjc.10134