Plot Quality Aided Plot-to-Track Association in Dense Clutter for Compact High-Frequency Surface Wave Radar

Due to high false alarm rate and low positioning accuracy of compact high-frequency surface wave radar in moving vessel detection, false plot-to-track association often occurs during moving vessel tracking, thus leading to track fragmentation and false tracking. In order to address this problem, a plot quality evaluation method is proposed and applied to plot-to-track association. Firstly, the differences in spatial correlation of echo spectrum amplitudes and position among moving vessels, clutters, and noise on a range-Doppler map are analyzed, and a plot quality index integrating multi-directional gradient, local variance, and plot position probability is developed. Then, the plots labeled as low quality are removed to reduce both the negative impact of false alarms on plot-to-track association and the computational burden. Eventually, both plot quality index and kinematic parameters are used to calculate the association cost and determine the plot-track pairs during the plot-to-track association procedure. Experimental results with field data demonstrate that the proposed plot quality index can effectively distinguish moving vessel and other plots. Compared with both the nearest neighbor data association method and the joint probability data association method, the association accuracy of the proposed method is greatly improved and, thus, the tracking continuity is enhanced in dense clutter scenarios.