Labelled multi‐Bernoulli filter with amplitude information for tracking marine weak targets

In marine radar detection applications, the threshold is generally lowered to detect weak targets with low signal to clutter ratios. Consequently, however, a large number of sea clutters can exceed the threshold, which leads to overwhelming spurious detections and makes the subsequent multi‐target tracking (MTT) difficult. In order to improve the tracking performance for marine weak targets, here, an approach to exploit the amplitude information of neighbouring cells is introduced. First, the joint amplitude likelihood of the neighbouring cells in sea clutter is derived, and then it is incorporated into the labelled multi‐Bernoulli filter to enhance the discrimination between targets and clutters. The simulation results of Swerling type 1 targets tracking in K‐distributed sea clutter show that the proposed method is superior in state estimation and cardinality estimation accuracy compared to the labelled multi‐Bernoulli filter utilising amplitude information of single cells. In addition, experiment results with real data prove its applicability to marine target tracking scenarios.