Passive target tracking with intermittent measurement based on random finite set

In the tracking problem for the maritime radiation source by a passive sensor, there are three main difficulties, i.e., the poor observability of the radiation source, the detection uncertainty (false and missed detections) and the uncertainty of the target appearing/disappearing in the field of view. These difficulties can make the establishment or maintenance of the radiation source target track invalid. By incorporating the elevation information of the passive sensor into the automatic bearings-only tracking (BOT) and consolidating these uncertainties under the framework of random finite set (RFS), a novel approach for tracking maritime radiation source target with intermittent measurement was proposed. Under the RFS framework, the target state was represented as a set that can take on either an empty set or a singleton; meanwhile, the measurement uncertainty was modeled as a Bernoulli random finite set. Moreover, the elevation information of the sensor platform was introduced to ensure observability of passive measurements and obtain the unique target localization. Simulation experiments verify the validity of the proposed approach for tracking maritime radiation source and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach in comparison with the traditional integrated probabilistic data association (IPDA) method. The tracking performance under different conditions, particularly involving different existence probabilities and different appearance durations of the target, indicates that the method to solve our problem is robust and effective.