Enhanced Multi-Target Tracking with Doppler Measurements

In many radar or sonar tracking systems, where the state of interest typically includes target position and velocity components, target Doppler measurements may be available in addition to the target position measurements. Using measurements of Doppler information directly in target trajectory estimation leads to a nonlinear filter implementation. In this paper we investigate the methods of using Doppler measurements to improve tracking performance while maintaining the tracker implementation in the linear domain. Two new methods, namely, the one point track initialisation and the Doppler data association are proposed. By applying these two methods on the linear multi-target integrated probabilistic data association algorithm (LMIPDA), we improve tracking performance in terms of reduced number of false tracks and computational load. The merits of the proposed approaches are demonstrated via an active sonar underwater multi-target tracking scenario.