Tracking in the presence of range deception ECM and clutter by decomposition and fusion

Range deception, such as range-gate-pull-off (RGPO), is a common electronic countermeasure (ECM) technique used to defeat or degrade tracking radars. Although a variety of heuristic approaches/tricks have been proposed to mitigate the impact of this type of ECM on the target tracking algorithms, none of them involve a systematic means to reject the countermeasure signals. This paper presents a general and systematic approach, called Decomposition and Fusion (DF) approach, for target tracking in the presence of range deception ECM and clutter. It is effective against RGPO, range-gate-pull-in, and range false target ECM techniques for a radar system (e.g., a monopulse radar) where the deception measurements have virtually the same angles as the target measurement. This DF approach has four fundamental components: (a) decomposing the validated measurements by determination of range deception measurements using hypothesis testing; (b) running one or more tracking filters using the detected range deception measurements only; (c) running a conventional tracking-in-clutter filter using the remaining measurements; (d) fusing the tracking filters by a probabilistically weighted sum of their estimates. Several algorithms within the DF approach are discussed.