A Data Fusion Algorithm for Marine Radar Tracking

Automatic radar plotting aids (ARPA) and automatic identification system (AIS) are the most important navigational systems on board. ARPA is considered as the primary anti-collision system, but its detecting ability, tracking accuracy and reliability are affected badly under the rough environmental weather condition. AIS provide steady and continuous navigation data come from GPS or DGPS with higher precision. In this paper, a data fusion algorithm has been developed for ARPA with AIS position data to improve its tracking accuracy and reliability. The proposed algorithm was experimented on a navigational radar simulator and a PC based platform programmed with VC++. The simulating results show that this method can effectively improve the accuracy and reliability of tracking.