A two-step multi-frame detection procedure for radar systems

In this paper we present a novel scheme for multiframe target detection in radar systems. The proposed architecture consists of a pre-processing stage, which extracts a set of candidate alarms (or plots) from the raw data measurements, and a multi-frame detector, which jointly elaborates observations from multiple scans, so as to exploit the space-time correlation in the pre-processed data, and confirms only reliable plots. A computationally efficient algorithm is derived, which accounts for the inherently sparse nature of the lists of candidate plots and resolve possible data association problems due to the presence of multiple targets. A thorough complexity and performance analysis is given.