A novel time-frequency approach for acceleration estimation from a single PRI

Tracking of highly maneuverable targets is an area of considerable interest to the radar and sonar community. Conventionally, tracking is performed using Kalman filtering based approach (with some modifications), using the position and velocity estimate of the target. Availability of the acceleration estimate of the target enhances tracking of highly maneuverable targets. Existing techniques estimate acceleration as an average over several PRIs. In this paper, we propose a novel time-frequency approach for estimating instantaneous acceleration of a target from a single PRI. This enhances the performance of the tracker and also facilitates the classification of the target on the basis of its “jerk”. The Wigner distribution (WD) based approach has been used in the simulations presented