A Kalman tracker with a turning acceleration estimator for maneuvering target tracking

A Kalman filter based scheme is proposed for radar maneuvering target tracking. The proposed scheme estimates the target acceleration input vector directly from the feature of maneuvering target trajectories and updates the simple Kalman tracker by the acceleration estimates. The proposed acceleration estimator provides better maneuver-following capability than an input estimator which uses residues of the Kalman filter. Simulation results for various target profiles are included for a comparison of the performance of our proposed scheme with that of conventional trackers.