A novel missile warhead tracking algorithm based on geometric data association

This paper proposes a new ballistic missile warhead tracking method for enhancing the anti-ballistic capability of a FMCW seeker used for ballistic missile defense (BMD) system. Under the assumption that the target has a single dominant scatterer, most FMCW radars adopt the well-known paring algorithm to obtain range and range rate information. However, the ballistic missile is generally composed of many scatterers and the warhead section of concern is not a dominant one. Therefore, the conventional paring algorithm may not be applicable for the ballistic missile warhead tracking. To overcome this limitation, the problem is reformulated as tracking of multiple scatterers of a ballistic missile in view of data association. Furthermore, an inventive hypotheses validation scheme is newly devised by exploiting the geometric constraint among scatterers corresponding to the ballistic missile warhead and its center of body. Therefore, the proposed geometric data association filter can drastically improve the warhead tracking performance in practice. Through computer simulations, the effectiveness and the reliability of the proposed method are demonstrated.