Single observer bearings-only tracking with the unscented Kalman filter

Abstract

The basic problem in target motion analysis (TMA) is to estimate the trajectory of an object from noise corrupted measurement data. The position and velocity of an emitter source can be determined from the bearing angle measurements of a passive observer. The paper introduces the recently developed unscented Kalman filter (UKF) in application to bearings-only tracking. What is more, the UKF is compared to the traditional extended Kalman filter (EKF). Simulation shows that the method performs very well even under the adverse circumstances of a noisy environment.