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.

Adaptive modified hough transform track initiator forHFSWR tracking of fast and small targets

High frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) is well proved to have over the horizon (OTH) detection capability to weak aerial targets, such as concealed airplanes or cruise missiles. The most important problem of detection of fast and small targets using HFSWR is earlier warning, i.e. enlargement of detection range oftargets. Therefore, the detection threshold should be decreased as low as possible, but numerous false alarms are brought about at the same time. On this condition, conventional track initiation techniques, which normally require the probability of false alarm to be at the level of 10-6, will initiate enormous false tracks and lead to abnormal operation of tracking system. An adaptive modified hough transform (AMHT) track initiator is proposed accordingly and the relation of detection range to the performance of track initiator is analyzed in this paper. Simulations are performed to confirm the capability of track initiation to fast and small targets in dense clutter by AMHT track initiator. The tolerable probability of false alarm of detector can reach the level of 10 -3 . And it performs better than track initiator based on modified hough transform (MHT).

Multi-Target Track Initiation in Heavy Clutter

In the heavy clutter environment, the information capacity is large,the relationships among information are complicated, and track initiationoften has a high false alarm rate or missing alarm rate. Obviously, it is adifficult task to get a high-quality track initiation in the limited measurementcycles. This paper studies the multi-target track initiation in heavy clutter.At first, a relaxed logic-based clutter filter algorithm is presented. In thealgorithm, the raw measurement is filtered by using the relaxed logic method.We not only design a kind of incremental and adaptive filtering gate, but alsoadd the angle extrapolation based on polynomial extrapolation. The algorithm eliminates most of the clutter and obtains the environment with highdetection rate and less clutter. Then, we propose a fuzzy sequential Houghtransform-based track initiation algorithm. The algorithm establishes a newmeshing rule according to system noise to balance the relationship between thegrid granularity and the track initiation quality. And a flexible superpositionmatrix based on fuzzy clustering is constructed, which avoids the transformation error caused by 0–1 voting method in traditional Hough transform.In addition, the algorithm allows the superposition matrixes of nonadjacentcycles to be associated to overcome the shortcoming that the track can’t beinitiated in time when the measurements appear in an intermittent way. Anda slope verification method is introduced to detect formation-intensive serialtracks. Last, the sliding window method is employed to feedback the trackinitiation results timely and confirm the track. Simulation results verify thatthe proposed algorithms can initiate the tracks accurately in heavy clutter.

Thermal Annealing Characteristics of Detrital Zircon Fission Track Obtained from Natural Borehole Samples

Previous studies proposed thermal simulation experiment to investigate the annealing characteristics of fission tracks in igneous zircon samples.However,basic research about detrital zircon fission track was relatively weak.This study discussed the initial track length,annealing temperature and annealing model of zircon fission track by using the measured track lengths obtained from natural borehole samples in the sedimentary basins with different thermal background.The results show that the initial track length of zircon fission track is 12.97 μm.The total annealing temperature(Ttotal) of zircon fission track derived from the evolutionary curve of the mean track lengths is approximately 400 ℃.The temperature ranges of 120-230 ℃ corresponds to the partial annealing zone(PAZ),and is lower than the range obtained through thermal annealing experiments.The annealing model is modified based on the measured track lengths.In addition,a functional formula about the mean track length,annealing temperature,and geological time is proposed,and the fitted values of track lengths consist with the measured track lengths in this study.By properly understanding the initial track length and annealing behavior of zircon fission track can provide a significant guidance for the study of hydrocarbon accumulation in sedimentary basins.