Experimental Research on Radar and ESM Measurement Fusion Technique Using Probabilistic Data Association for Cooperative Target Tracking

Target processing mechanisms are necessary to collect target information, real-time data fusion, and tactical environment recognition for cooperative engagement ability. Among these mechanisms, the target tracking starts from predicting state of speed, acceleration, and location by using sensors' measurements. However, it can be a problem to give the reliability because the measurements have a certain uncertainty. Thus, a technique which uses multiple sensors is needed to detect the target and increase the reliability. Also, data fusion technique is necessary to process the data which is provided from heterogeneous sensors for target tracking. In this paper, a target tracking algorithm is proposed based on probabilistic data association(PDA) by fusing radar and ESM sensor measurements. The radar sensor's azimuth and range measurements and the ESM sensor's bearing-only measurement are associated by the measurement fusion method. After gating associated measurements, state estimation of the target is performed by PDA filter. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm provides improved estimation under linear and circular target motions.