Doppler-only tracking under a minimum detectable velocity constraint

This paper addresses the problem of multi-static doppler-only tracking in doppler blind zone (DBZ). In such a problem, target measurements are suppressed when the rangerate (doppler) drops below a specified threshold in magnitude (the minimum detectable velocity, MDV). Moreover, tracking using doppler-only measurements is not an easy problem due to its weak observability. In order to improve the estimation performance, a novel three-step method is proposed. In the first step, a standard Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is applied using obtained measurements. In the second step, preliminary estimates of mean and covariance are obtained conditioned on the MDV constraints, to which we refer as the coarse-step since it needs a linearization step. In the third step, Monte Carlo (MC) truncation technique for enforcing the constraints is used for further process, to which we refer as the fine-step. Simulation results show that the proposed method is more effective with moderate computational cost.