Estimation of flight altitude in high frequency surface wave radar

This paper proposes a new method to estimate the target altitude of an aircraft using high frequency surface wave radar(HFSWR) for the surveillance of the Exclusive Economic Zone. The initial position and velocity in 3-D coordinates are estimated based on quasi-Newton method from a sequence of measurements, this initial values are incorporated for 3-D tracking with the modified iterated extended Kalman filter(IEKF), a multiple model approach is adopted to improve the tracking accuracy. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.