A shrinkage probability hypothesis density filter for multitarget tracking

In radar systems, tracking targets in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) environments is a very important task. There are some algorithms designed for multitarget tracking. Their performances, however, are not satisfactory in low SNR environments. Track-before-detect (TBD) algorithms have been developed as a class of improved methods for tracking in low SNR environments. However, multitarget TBD is still an open issue. In this article, multitarget TBD measurements are modeled, and a highly efficient filter in the framework of finite set statistics (FISST) is designed. Then, the probability hypothesis density (PHD) filter is applied to multitarget TBD. Indeed, to solve the problem of the target and noise not being separated correctly when the SNR is low, a shrinkage-PHD filter is derived, and the optimal parameter for shrinkage operation is obtained by certain optimization procedures. Through simulation results, it is shown that our method can track targets with high accuracy by taking advantage of shrinkage operations.