Iterative Look-up Table Based Track Initialization of Doppler-only Passive Multi-static Radar

Directional sensitivity of track initialisation of a multistatic Doppler‐only passive radar network

“…The track is initialised with a multistep process that starts by looking up a position in an artificial flight data table, and it continues with the data processing steps in which track candidates are evaluated against the measurements. With the data processing steps, the best match to the measurements from several track candidates is chosen to be initialised as a tracked track [7]. Because processing of EKF is done in Doppler space, plane flight data (state model) are changed to Doppler space with a non-linear function (1).…”

“…The first requirement of directional information is to disambiguate the symmetry of the Cassini oval by separating flights in the east from those in the west [7]. This setup allows us to install a station to any place where normal electrical power and an Internet connection are available.…”

“…Such a system is truly passive when it does not feature a transmitter at all, but instead relies on a set of transmitters of opportunity. In a series of articles describing the construction of a multistatic network of passive radar receivers based on forward-scatter, our research group has outlined, constructed and measured the performance of such a system [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9].…”

“…However, such a design faces another problem. With no information about the direction of arrival or the bistatic range of the Doppler shift caused by an aircraft, it is challenging to initialise tracking of targets accurately, so that the extended Kalman filter (EKF) used for the task can converge on the true trajectory in online tracking [7].…”