Maneuvering Target Tracking in the Presence of Glint using the Nonlinear Gaussian Mixture Kalman Filter

The problem of maneuvering target tracking in the presence of glint noise is addressed in this work. The main challenge in this problem stems from its nonlinearity and non-Gaussianity. A new estimator, named as nonlinear Gaussian mixture Kalman filter (NL-GMKF) is derived based on the minimum-mean-square error (MMSE) criterion and applied to the problem of maneuvering target tracking in the presence of glint. The tracking performance of the NL-GMKF is evaluated and compared with the interacting multiple modeling (IMM) implemented with extended Kalman filter (EKF), unscented Kalman filter (UKF), particle filter (PF) and the Gaussian sum PF (GSPF). It is shown that the NL-GMKF outperforms these algorithms in several examples with maneuvering target and/or glint noise measurements.