A Novel Track -Before-Detect Algorithm for Airborne Target with Over-The-Horizon Radar

As a special system of early warning radar, high-frequency sky-wave over-the-horizon (OTH) radar usually needs to detect sea and airborne targets in the same direction simultaneously. However, the long coherent integration time (CIT) required by the sea target makes the echo data about high-speed moving airborne target in the same direction incompletely coherent, which is not conductive to the detection and tracking of airborne target. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a novel track-before-detect (TBD) algorithm for airborne target. Firstly, the motion prior knowledge of the airborne target is utilized to select the number of pulses in the CIT to perform coherent integration processing. Then TBD based on dynamic programming (DP-TBD) technique is used to realize the noncoherent integration for the detection and tracking of the airborne target. Simulation results show that compared with the traditional method, the proposed algorithm effectively improve the detection and tracking performance of the airborne target.