Tracking and Kalman Filtering Made Easy

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This guide offers an accessible introduction to radar tracking and Kalman filtering, covering linear and nonlinear ballistic and satellite tracking systems. It also includes voltage-processing methods—Givens, Householder, and Gram-Schmidt—for least-squares filtering to address computer round-off errors. Emphasizing the physical and geometric aspects of radar filters, the book showcases the elegance and simplicity of their mathematics. With numerous design equations, procedures, and curves, readers can quickly design tracking filters and evaluate their performance using just a pocket calculator. The text features problems and solutions, figures, photographs, and straightforward derivations for various filters, addressing issues like clutter returns, redundant target detections, inconsistent data, track-start and track-drop rules, data association, matched filtering, and tracking with chirp waveforms. It also discusses techniques such as the moving target detector (MTD) for clutter rejection. Explanations are clear and simple, covering topics like the voltage-processing approach to least-squares filtering, the correlation between discrete orthogonal Legendre polynomial (DOLP) and voltage processing, and the mathematical parallels between tracking and estimation problems. This resource is invaluable for engineers, scientists, and mathematicians involved in tracking filter design, making it an excellent textbook for senior-unde