A Kalman-tracker-based Bayesian detector for radar interference in radio astronomy

Radio astronomical observations of important L-band spectral lines must often be made at frequencies allocated to pulsed air surveillance radar in the 1215-1350 MHz band. Such pulsed interference must be dealt with at the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and other observatories by "blanking" to remove corrupted data. This paper presents a new algorithm which improves aircraft echo detection by using a Kalman tracker to follow the path of a sequence of echoes. This Bayesian method enables more sensitive weak echo detection. Track information is used to form a spatial prior probability distribution for the presence of echoes in the next antenna sweep. A lower detection threshold is used in higher probability regions to pull out low level pulses without increasing the overall probability of false alarm detection.