<title>Image-enhanced passive tracking of maneuvering targets</title>

Abstract

The design of effective pointing-and-tracking systems is particularly difficult when the target is capable of evasive maneuvers. Traditional approaches employed to detect a change in maneuver acceleration rely on observing changes in the residual error process, which introduces a time lag between the onset of a maneuver and its detection. This problem is exacerbated when only passive bearing measurements are available because measurement localization errors are infinite in one dimension. Earlier studies using active (range and bearing) measurement models have suggested the use of an augmenting imaging sensor to determine target orientation, from which the likely direction of a maneuver acceleration can be inferred. This paper extends these earlier results to the case of passive (bearing only) measurements, again using an augmenting imaging sensor to estimate target orientation. This sequence of orientation measurements is used to infer the onset and direction of a maneuver acceleration. As in these earlier studies, orientation measurements provide significant value in localizing and tracking the target during a maneuver.