A Track-before-detect Algorithm for Tracking Multiple Fluctuating Targets Using Passive Multistatic Radar

A Track-Before-Detect (TBD) algorithm is presented to jointly detect and track multiple fluctuating targets under passive multistatic radar system based on Multi-target Multi-Bernoulli (MeMBer) filter. Because the amplitude likelihood is uncertain due to the unknown mean Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of fluctuating targets, firstly a uniform prior distribution is assumed for the mean SNR corresponding to the envelope output, and a likelihood function is marginalized over the range of possible values. Based on this approximated likelihood function, the fusion centre uses all the amplitude measurements from each receiver transmitter pair to update the predicted Bernoulli components. Simulations show that the proposed algorithm can jointly detect and track multiple fluctuating targets effectively, furthermore, the performance is similar to the situation of the known mean SNR when the value of the mean SNR is higher than 9 dB.