Classification of primary radar tracks using Gaussian mixture models

Classification of primary surveillance radar tracks as either aircraft or non-aircraft is critical to a number of emerging applications, including airspace situational awareness and collision avoidance. Substantial research has focused on target classification of pre-processed radar surveillance data. Unfortunately, many non-aircraft tracks still pass through the clutter-reduction processing built into the aviation surveillance radars used by the Federal Aviation Administration. This paper demonstrates an approach to radar track classification that uses only post-processed position reports and does not require features that are typically only available during the pre-processing stage. Gaussian mixture models learned from recorded data are shown to perform well without the use of features that have been traditionally used for target classification, such as radar cross-section measurements.