Vessel tracking with small-aperture compact high-frequency surface wave radar

Small-aperture compact high-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) has attracted significant attention due to its advantages of less space demand, lower power consumption and flexible deployment and maintenance. However, it has lower detection rate due to the reduced transmitting power and can only provide moderate range resolution and poor azimuth resolution because of the small number of receiving antennas, which exert more challenges for target tracking. In this paper, the general target tracking problems associated with compact HFSWR were investigated and an applicable vessel tracking method was proposed. Several schemes including a data association method based on minimal cost, a multi-step state prediction strategy, as well as an azimuth smoothing procedure were integrated together to improve the tracking performance. Target tracking field tests were conducted and the results showed that the quality of the obtained tracks is comparable to that obtained by larger array HFSWR, which demonstrates the target monitoring capacity of small-aperture compact HFSWR.