A Heuristic Algorithm for Track-Before-Detect With Thresholded Observations in Radar Systems

We consider here the two-stage, multi-frame detection architecture proposed in in the context of radar systems, wherein the Detector and Plot Extractor provides a list of candidate detections (or plots) on a scan-by-scan basis to a Track-before-detect (TBD) Processor, which correlates data over multiple scans before taking the final decision as to the target presence. We propose a heuristic algorithm to implement the TBD processor, and we show that its computational complexity is smaller than that of the algorithm proposed in . Numerical examples demonstrate that the detection and estimation performance obtained with the new algorithm is almost coincident with that obtained with the algorithm in .