Robust Track Association for Ship Localization With Multiple Compact HF Radars

Compact high-frequency (HF) radar is a promising tool for maritime surveillance owing to its over-the-horizon and all-weather ability. However, it typically suffers from low tracking accuracy due to limited azimuth resolution. Cross localization using multiple radars provides a solution, but track-to-track association among radars remains a critical challenge. Previous association methods are mainly subject to that each radar’s range and azimuth measurement errors are comparable and sufficiently small, which is not satisfied in HF radar. In this article, we propose a novel track association algorithm based on the target region match (TRM) strategy, which employs the joint range and azimuth gates intersection criterion to combine the effect of range and azimuth measurement errors. Considering the azimuth error is much larger than that of the range, their contribution to the track association is balanced through the area intersection operation. Both simulation and experiment results show that the proposed TRM method produces better association performance than the other investigated methods.