A fully-hardware-type maximum-parallel architecture for Kalman tracking filter in FPGAs

The Kalman filter for linear estimation and the extended Kalman filter for nonlinear estimation are the most typical complex and precise algorithms used for target tracking. But, for multi-target tracking (MTT) radar systems, the computational time for calculating the Kalman-filter-based algorithms in software is too long to meet today´s warfare needs. The FPGA-based reconfigurable Kalman filtering coprocessor for MTT systems has been proposed. A fully-hardware-type maximum parallel FPGA-based Kalman tracking filtering coprocessor in a track-while-scan (TWS) radar system has been designed and presented. The performance gained in our approach includes two to three orders of magnitude higher speed than other implementations