A novel approach to high frequency radar ship tracking exploiting aspect diversity

Low-power High-Frequency Surface-Wave (HFSW) radars, designed for oceanic applications, are promising tools also for long-range surveillance in open-water Multi-Target Tracking (MTT) applications. This paper focuses on the fusion of multiple aspects over single-perspective systems. The single-sensor tracking steps, made up by the Joint Probabilistic Data Association (JPDA) rule and the Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF), are followed by a Track-to-Track association and Fusion (T2TF) strategy. Tracking performance improvements are investigated using real data collected by two simultaneously operated HFSW-radars.