A Dual-Attention Temporal Convolutional Network-Based Track Initiation Method for Maneuvering Targets

In strong clutter and maneuvering scenarios, radar track initiation faces the dual challenges of a low initiation rate and high false alarm rate. Although the existing deep learning methods show promise, the commonly adopted “feature flattening” input strategy destroys the intrinsic temporal structure and feature relationships of track data, limiting its discriminative performance. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel radar track initiation method based on Dual-Attention Temporal Convolutional Network (DA-TCN), reformulating track initiation as a binary classification task for very short multi-channel time series that preserve complete temporal structure. The DA-TCN model employs the TCN as its backbone network to extract local dynamic features and innovatively constructs a dual-attention architecture: a channel attention branch dynamically calibrates the importance of each kinematic feature, while a temporal attention branch integrates Bi-GRU and self-attention mechanisms to capture the dependencies at critical time steps. Ultimately, a learnable gated fusion mechanism adaptively weights the dual-branch information for optimal characterization of track characteristics. Experimental results on maneuvering target datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms multiple baseline models across varying clutter densities: Under the highest clutter density, DA-TCN achieves 95.12% true track initiation rate (+1.6% over best baseline) with 9.65% false alarm rate (3.63% reduction), validating its effectiveness for high-precision and highly robust track initiation in complex environments.