VLO Target Track Extractor for Radar and for Camera

Acquisition of a 4 dB SNR TBM target with an ESA radar. The acquisition of a very low observable (VLO) incoming tactical ballistic missile using the measurements from a surface based electronically scanned array (ESA) radar is presented. We present a batch maximum likelihood (ML) estimator to acquire the missile while it is exoatmospheric. The proposed estimator, which combines ML estimation with the probabilistic data association (PDA) approach resulting in the ML-PDA algorithm to handle false alarms, also uses target features. This algorithm acts as an ef ective "power multiplier" for the radar by about an order of magnitude. The Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB), quantifying the attainable estimation accuracies is presented and shown to be met by the ML-PDA estimator. The ML-PDA estimator is also applied to real EO data. Comparison with the MHT.