Study on mechanism of dynamic programming algorithm for dim target

An important problem in the field of radar signal processing, and a sequence of infrared images detection which arouses people´s attention widely is the detection and tracking of dim moving targets in very low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or signal-to-clutter ratio environment. Track-before-detect (TBD) is especially useful for detecting and tracking moving targets in the condition of low SNR. In fact, dynamic programming is a problem of multi-stage decisions, and the dynamic programming algorithm (DPA) is an effective approach, which was adopted during the process of TBD. In the current work, the mechanism of the dynamic programming algorithm is analyzed, and a number of technical innovations that improve the performance of DPA are presented. Simulation results show this approach has high ability of detection for dim moving targets, and achieve 3∼5 dB SNR gains comparable to those from other detection algorithms.