An Information-Theoretic Approach to Target Estimation of a Laser Radar Tracking System
Abstract
High energy laser systems with highly accurate measurements as target tracking sensors use a conical scan process to obtain a target capture and tracking within the narrow beamwidth. This searching process and the target tracking algorithm are major factors in the performance of the laser radar/ target tracking system. Previous research results use information-theoretic concepts in establishing a laser radar/target tracking performance bound independent of the filtering algorithm. A computer program was developed to calculate the lower bound of the estimation error due to the non-linear gaussian glint measurement process. Applying the Extended Kalman filter to the angle estimation problem for a gaussian glint measurement process, the resulting filter is found to have a structure consisting of a series of demodulations with gains adaptively determined by the resulting angle estimate. The optimal performance of this estimation process is shown to be dependent on the angle and a bound on the performance as well as a numerical algorithm is presented.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 20, 1984
- Accession Number
- ADA142247
Entities
People
- Paul R. Kalata
Organizations
- Drexel University