3D Target Tracking with Online Revisit Interval Calculation for Rotating Radar

In the tracking scenario of rotating radar, the revisit interval of a target varies from scan to scan while it is approximated to the radar scanning period. Such approximation would seriously violate the ground truth at certain times. This paper investigates the challenge of time-variant revisit intervals in rotating radars for 3D target tracking. By applying the Space-Time Joint Processing (STJP) method in three-dimensional space, the revisit intervals and predicted states are dynamically calculated in real-time. To handle the nonlinearities in converting coordinates from Cartesian to polar, the STJP method is integrated with the Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF), and the corresponding initialization method is well formulated. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed space-time joint algorithm significantly reduces tracking errors in 3 axes compared to conventional methods with fixed update periods when the revisit interval significantly deviates from the fixed scanning period, achieving performance comparable to that of the UKF with true revisit intervals.