Target Tracking Using Pre-tracking Compressive Detector

Track before detect(TBD) is an effective target tracking strategy in Nyquist sensing and processing(NSP) field. However, it cannot be directly applied in compressive sensing and processing (CSP), which refers acquiring and processing signal at sub-Nyquist rate without signal recovery, due to the sub-sampled nonlinear measurement. In this work, a TBD method is proposed for tracking a single target in CSP. A pre-tracking compressive detector is first developed to improve the detection performance by processing the compressive measurement directly with prior information on the signal structure, then a Modified Variational Bayesian Adaptive Kalman Filter (VBAKF) algorithm is adopted for target tracking. Simulation results verify the validity of the proposed method both in target detecting and tracking.

I. Introduction

Applying compressive sensing/sampling(CS) to radar signal processing is a research hotspot in recent years [1]–[3]. Modern radar systems often operate with high bandwidths, thus ultra-high sampling rates and processing speeds are required by Nyquist sampling theory, which makes real-time signal processing a challenge in transmission, calculation and storage. Because targets are spare in radar signals, CS can be applied to alleviate the pressure of signal acquisition and processing while retaining all information of radar echo signals [3]–[5].