Airborne Infrared Search and Track Systems

Infrared search and track (IRST) systems are required for fighter aircraft to enable them to passively search, detect, track, classify, and prioritise multiple airborne targets under all aspects, look-up, look-down, and co-altitude conditions and engage them at as long ranges as possible. While the IRST systems have been proven in performance for ground-based and naval-based platforms, it is still facing some technical problems for airborne applications. These problems arise from uncertainty in target signature, atmospheric effects, background clutter (especially dense and varying clouds), signal and data processing algorithms to detect potential targets at long ranges and some hardware limitations such as large memory requirement to store and process wide field of view data. In this paper, an overview of airborne IRST as a system has been presented with detailed comparative simulation results of different detectionitracking algorithms and the present status of airborne IRSTs.

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