Extended Kalman filter with pseudo noise compensation for very long range radar tracking

This paper considers very long range tracking with phased-array radars. It could be of challenge since the severe nonlinearity involved. An extended Kalman filter with pseudo measurement noise compensation (PMNCEKF) is proposed. Simulation comparison with the existing method shows that the proposed PMNCEKF is able to give consistent estimation results with improved range filtering performance. More importantly, it can process measurements in either the range-direction-sine (r-u-v) coordinates or the spherical (r-a-e) coordinates. For very long range tracking, the errors of the first-order series expansion of the nonlinear measurements around the predicted state can be very large, especially in the range direction. The PMNCEKF was derived by taking into account these expansion errors, which makes sure the filtering consistency.