Detecting and tracking of small moving target in avian radar images

A sequence of plane position indicator (PPI) images containing a small moving target is collected using an experimental avian radar surveillance system, which is constructed by modifying a standard marine radar. Smoothing trajectory of a small moving target is separated from the image sequence after background subtraction, clutter suppression, measurements extraction and tracking. The background image is generated by Fast Independent Component Analysis (FastICA). Low segmentation value is set in clutter suppression to improve detecting rate at the cost of introducing a great deal of clutters. Therefore, false alarm rate need to be reduced by tracking. Meanwhile, a modified Hough transform method is applied for track initiation. Monte Carlo data association is proposed for track maintenance and Kalman filtering is adopted for target state prediction and update. Finally, the trajectory is smoothed and then fused with a satellite map for further observation.