Automatic scene tracking in radar images by sampling them over a digital video structure

This work presents an approach to convert surveillance and navigation radar video signals into digital video in order to be displayed, processed and coded like image sequences and to automatically track moving objects in the scene. This is accomplished by digitizing the original analog radar video signals and sampling them over a 3-D digital video lattice structure. To track the moving objects, data acquired from the radar during one complete antenna revolution is divided into small blocks, and the motion of these blocks, in increments of the video frame sampling period, is estimated. The proposed system has many advantages in visual and automatic detection and tracking of targets over the conventional ones