3-D Hough Transform for Surveillance Radar Target Detection

A 3-D Hough transform is introduced for detection of linear trajectories in a 3-D data space. Data space is constructed from returned radar data using range, bearing, and time information. This information is then mapped into a 3-D Cartesian data space. The constant velocity target trajectories appear as straight lines in this space, and are detected by the usage of 3-D Hough transform. The efficacy of the 3-D Hough transform is verified by simulation. In comparison with the 2-D case, when only the range-time information is used, the 3-D Hough transform has a better performance.