Moving target indication

About: Moving target indication is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2653 publications have been published within this topic receiving 32435 citations.

All Source Adaptive Fusion for Aided Navigation in Non-GPS Environment

Abstract: An innovative approach for navigation in non-GPS environment is presented based on all source adaptive fusion of any available information encompassing passive imaging data, digital elevation terrain data, IMU/GPS, altimeters, and star tracker. The approach provides continuous navigation through non-GPS environment and yields an improved navigation in the presence of GPS. The approach also provides reduced target location error and moving target indication.

SAR wavefront reconstruction using motion-compensated phase history (polar format) data and DPCA-based GMTI

Abstract: This paper address the problem of processing an X-band SAR database that was originally intended for processing via a polar format imaging algorithm. In our approach, we use the approximation-free SAR wavefront reconstruction. For this, the measured and motion compensated phase history (polar format) data are processed in a multi-dimensional digital signal processing algorithm that yields alias-free slow-time samples. The resultant database is used for wavefront image formation. The X-band SAR system also provides a two channel along-track monopulse database. The alias-free monopulse SAR data are used in a coherent signal subspace algorithm for Ground Moving Target Indication (GMTI). Results are provided.

Detecting and tracking of small moving target in avian radar images

Abstract: A sequence of plane position indicator (PPI) images containing a small moving target is collected using an experimental avian radar surveillance system, which is constructed by modifying a standard marine radar. Smoothing trajectory of a small moving target is separated from the image sequence after background subtraction, clutter suppression, measurements extraction and tracking. The background image is generated by Fast Independent Component Analysis (FastICA). Low segmentation value is set in clutter suppression to improve detecting rate at the cost of introducing a great deal of clutters. Therefore, false alarm rate need to be reduced by tracking. Meanwhile, a modified Hough transform method is applied for track initiation. Monte Carlo data association is proposed for track maintenance and Kalman filtering is adopted for target state prediction and update. Finally, the trajectory is smoothed and then fused with a satellite map for further observation.

Road-Aided Ground Slowly Moving Target 2D Motion Estimation for Single-Channel Synthetic Aperture Radar

Abstract: To detect and estimate ground slowly moving targets in airborne single-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR), a road-aided ground moving target indication (GMTI) algorithm is proposed in this paper. First, the road area is extracted from a focused SAR image based on radar vision. Second, after stationary clutter suppression in the range-Doppler domain, a moving target is detected and located in the image domain via the watershed method. The target’s position on the road as well as its radial velocity can be determined according to the target’s offset distance and traffic rules. Furthermore, the target’s azimuth velocity is estimated based on the road slope obtained via polynomial fitting. Compared with the traditional algorithms, the proposed method can effectively cope with slowly moving targets partly submerged in a stationary clutter spectrum. In addition, the proposed method can be easily extended to a multi-channel system to further improve the performance of clutter suppression and motion estimation. Finally, the results of numerical experiments are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Clutter Suppression and Target Tracking by the Low-Rank Representation for Airborne Maritime Surveillance Radar

Abstract: Moving target detection is of vital importance to maritime security and maritime resource protection. However, the detection of slow or weak targets is difficult based on traditional methods. A new detection method is proposed by using the different motion variations of radar moving target and sea clutter in the range-Doppler spectrum sequence. The first step in implementing this method is the separation of moving target and sea clutter by the low-rank representation, in which the target and clutter are modeled as foreground and background components. Subsequently, a sea clutter discriminator is constructed within the sea clutter bandwidth to further remove the sea clutter (false alarms) that exists in the foreground. The proposed method can reduce the sea clutter power while maintaining the target power and improve the detection rate of moving targets, especially slow or weak targets. Data collected with airborne maritime surveillance radar in maritime moving target indication (MMTI) mode are used to validate the performance of the proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that the improvement in the signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) obtained with the proposed method is better than that obtained with space-time adaptive processing (STAP, including 1DT-STAP, 3DT-STAP and sparse-STAP) and principal component pursuit (PCP) methods; additionally, the figure of merit (FOM) of the proposed method is higher than that of the constant false alarm rate (CFAR) and PCP method. Furthermore, the tracks of ships are obtained by applying a location constraint to the foreground sequence.