Security surveillance of low-altitude airspace with primary radar

An affordable low-altitude airspace experimental radar surveillance system was introduced and the target detection and tracking scheme based on plane position indicator (PPI) radar images was proposed, where clutter suppression and target state estimation are two critical techniques. After background subtraction of PPI radar images, there are still much clutter distributed around the original background objects, so its spatial characteristic was utilized for clutter suppression, and then the interactive multiple models (IMM) method was adopted for tracking of target maneuvering motions with uniform speed, acceleration, deceleration and turning. The performance of the tracking algorithm was deeply investigated against simulated data. Results of the application of overall scheme to two sets of live PPI images were also provided showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach.