Radar Image Fusion and Target Tracking

The sea traffic surrounding many large ports is becoming increasingly crowded. Traffic regulation is needed to allow even higher traffic densities and to avoid dangerous situations. The traffic regulation is managed from Vessel Traffic Surveillance (VTS) centers. In these centers radar images from radar posts in the vicinity of the port are analyzed. When a ship enters the surveillance zone, the new ship is tagged with an ID with which the ship can be identified during observation. Because each radar post in the VTS system will only cover a small area it is possible for the ship to move in regions that are being observed by different radars. When this happens the ship's ID must remain the same. Furthermore, when tracking ships with radar, highly robust tracking algorithms are needed, because the radar signal is often contaminated with a lot of noise. This can lead to a failure of ship detection or a wrong ID-tag to ship association. To cope with these problems a multiple hypothesis tracking (MHT) algorithm using Kalman filtering has been developed. An extensive radar-image simulation environment is also created to generate test scenarios for the tracking algorithm.