A novel compressed sensing based track before detect algorithm for tracking multiple targets

A novel compressed sensing based track-before-detect (TBD) algorithm is presented in this paper, which is named as CS-TBD algorithm. The proposed CS-TBD algorithm reconstructs the whole radar scenario (direction of arrival (DOA)-Doppler plane) for each range gate at consecutive scans using an improved StOMP algorithm, resulting in a three-dimensional range-DOA-Doppler space. The proposed algorithm then performs temporal tracking in the newly built three-dimensional range-DOA-Doppler space, based on the information from multiple illuminations during each scan, as well as among consecutive scans. In the proposed CS-TBD algorithm, the improved StOMP algorithm together with the temporal tracking, can effectively distinguish true targets from false targets and clutter based on information from multiple illuminations.