An adaptive-gain alpha-beta tracker combined with circular prediction for maneuvering target tracking

Tracking systems with phased-array antennas have used α-β filters. An α-β filter can reliably estimate the target position and velocity operation in real time. When the target maneuvers, the quality of the position and velocity estimates provided by an α-β filter degrades significantly. For tracking maneuvering targets, an α-β filter combined with circular prediction has been proposed. However, there is the problem that the estimates of the α-β filter combined with circular prediction are degraded when tracking maneuvering targets because the smoothed positions that are input to the circular prediction filter are adversely affected by increasing linear prediction errors. In this paper, we propose an adaptive-gain α-β tracker combined with circular prediction to improve tracking quality compared with conventional filters. The filter gain of our proposed scheme is variable by the use of a maneuver detector. Simulation results for various target profiles are included to compare the performance of our proposed scheme with that of conventional tracking filters.