Ground target tracking with RCS estimation based on signal strength measurements

The discrimination of closely spaced targets is a major challenge in the ground target-tracking domain based on measurements of airborne ground moving target indication radar. Being a standard output of modern radar systems, the measured signal strength of a radar detection can be used to estimate the characteristic mean radar cross section (RCS) of a ground target, which is then used as additional target attribute information to improve the tracking performance in situations with closely spaced targets. For this method to work, the fluctuations of the target RCS are assumed to follow the analytically tractable Swerling-I and Swerling-III cases. In this work, the RCS estimation scheme originally developed for air targets [1, 2] is generalized to ground-moving objects and then implemented into the Gaussian mixture cardinalized probability hypothesis density filter. The performance of the resulting algorithm is analyzed based on single and multiple-target simulation scenarios. In the latter case, a modified version of the optimal subpattern assignment metric that also accounts for labeling errors is used.