Plot Quality Aided Plot-to-Track Association in Dense Clutter for Compact High-Frequency Surface Wave Radar

Due to high false alarm rate and low positioning accuracy of compact high-frequency surface wave radar in moving vessel detection, plot-to-track association often occurs during tracking, thus leading track fragmentation tracking. In order address this problem, a plot quality evaluation method is proposed applied association. Firstly, the differences spatial correlation echo spectrum amplitudes position among vessels, clutters, noise on range-Doppler map are analyzed, index integrating multi-directional gradient, local variance, probability developed. Then, plots labeled as removed reduce both negative impact alarms computational burden. Eventually, kinematic parameters used calculate cost determine plot-track pairs procedure. Experimental results with field data demonstrate that can effectively distinguish other plots. Compared nearest neighbor joint method, greatly improved and, thus, tracking continuity enhanced dense clutter scenarios.