Adaptive TPHD Tracking for Individuals Within a Bird Flock Using Doppler Features

Tracking multiple targets within a group is a challenging task in the radar field, especially for a bird flock. Targets in a group are usually closely spaced and exhibit similar characteristics. Additionally, the tracking radar typically employs a narrow beam to achieve a high range–angular resolution, resulting in incomplete measurements within the limited beamwidth. These factors lead to false association and track fragmentation in target tracking. However, in addition to kinematic characteristics, birds exhibit temporally correlated micro-Doppler signatures because of their wingbeat behavior, which can be utilized in target tracking. Therefore, this paper proposes an adaptive TPHD tracking method using Doppler features. First, a Doppler temporal contrastive network is designed to learn the micro-Doppler representation for the association of birds. Then, the learned feature is fused with kinematic parameters, using XGBoost to guide the weight update in the filter. Moreover, adaptive mechanisms are incorporated into the TPHD filter to achieve stable tracking under incomplete measurements. Simulation and experimental results verified the effectiveness of the proposed method and showed better tracking performance than the competing method.