A range rate based detection technique for tracking a maneuvering target

In this paper a novel approach for detecting unknown target maneuver using range rate information is proposed based on the generalized Page's test with the estimated target acceleration magnitude. Due to the high nonlinearity between the range rate measurement and the target state, a measurement conversion technique is used to treat range rate as a linear measurement in Cartesian coordinates so that a standard Kalman filter can be applied. The detection performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with that of existing maneuver detectors over various target maneuver motions. In addition, a model switching tracker based on the proposed maneuver detector is compared with the state-of-the-art IMM estimator. The results indicate the effectiveness of the maneuver detection scheme which simplifies the tracker design. The tracking performance is also evaluated using a steady state analysis.