A Track Initiation Method for the Underwater Target Tracking Environment

A novel efficient track initiation method is proposed for the harsh underwater target tracking environment(heavy clutter and large measurement errors): track splitting, evaluating, pruning and merging method(TSEPM). Track initiation demands that the method should determine the existence and initial state of a target quickly and correctly.Heavy clutter and large measurement errors certainly pose additional difficulties and challenges, which deteriorate and complicate the track initiation in the harsh underwater target tracking environment. There are three primary shortcomings for the current track initiation methods to initialize a target:(a) they cannot eliminate the turbulences of clutter effectively;(b) there may be a high false alarm probability and low detection probability of a track;(c) they cannot estimate the initial state for a new confirmed track correctly. Based on the multiple hypotheses tracking principle and modified logic-based track initiation method, in order to increase the detection probability of a track,track splitting creates a large number of tracks which include the true track originated from the target. And in order to decrease the false alarm probability, based on the evaluation mechanism, track pruning and track merging are proposed to reduce the false tracks. TSEPM method can deal with the track initiation problems derived from heavy clutter and large measurement errors, determine the target’s existence and estimate its initial state with the least squares method. What’s more, our method is fully automatic and does not require any kind manual input for initializing and tuning any parameter. Simulation results indicate that our new method improves significantly the performance of the track initiation in the harsh underwater target tracking environment.

Tracking performance of large margin classifier in automatic modulation classification with a software radio environment

Automatic modulation classification is the process of identification of the modulation type of a signal in a general environment. This paper proposes a new method to evaluate the tracking performance of large margin classifier against signal-tonoise ratio （SNR）, and classifies all forms of primary user＇s signals in a cognitive radio environment. For achieving this objective, two structures of a large margin are developed in additive white Gaussian noise （AWGN） channels with priori unknown SNR. A combination of higher order statistics and instantaneous characteristics is selected as effective features. Simulation results show that the classification rates of the proposed structures are well robust against environmental SNR changes.