Track formation with bearing and frequency measurements in clutter

A target motion analysis for a narrowband passive sonar that yields bearing and frequency measurements in the presence of false detections (clutter) in a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) environment is proposed. The likelihood function used to compute the maximum likelihood estimation of the track parameters (localization and frequency) incorporates the false alarms via the probabilistic data association technique. The Cramer-Rao lower bound is calculated, and results obtained from simulations are shown to be compatible with it. A test of track acceptance is presented. It is shown that the proposed estimator is statistically efficient even in the difficult situation when the platform does not maneuver and the observability is obtained only by the use of the frequency measurements