Bernoulli particle filter with observer altitude for maritime radiation source tracking in the presence of measurement uncertainty

For maritime radiation source target tracking in particular electronic counter measures (ECM) environment, there exists two main problems which can deteriorate the tracking performance of traditional approaches. The first problem is the poor observability of the radiation source. The second one is the measurement uncertainty which includes the uncertainty of the target appearing/disappearing and the detection uncertainty (false and missed detections). A novel approach is proposed in this paper for tracking maritime radiation source in the presence of measurement uncertainty. To solve the poor observability of maritime radiation source target, using the radiation source motion restriction, the observer altitude information is incorporated into the bearings-only tracking (BOT) method to obtain the unique target localization. Then the two uncertainties in the ECM environment are modeled by the random finite set (RFS) theory and the Bernoulli filtering method with the observer altitude is adopted to solve the tracking problem of maritime radiation source in such context. Simulation experiments verify the validity of the proposed approach for tracking maritime radiation source, and also demonstrate the superiority of the method compared with the traditional integrated probabilistic data association (IPDA) method. The tracking performance under different conditions, particularly those involving different duration of radiation source opening and switching-off, indicates that the method to solve our problem is robust and effective.