Systemic approach explored in the context of passive target tracking
Résumé
or obvious reasons of cost, discretion and reliability costs, locating and tracking aerial targets under an electromagnetically completely passive paradigm, relying exclusively on illuminators of opportunity, is very appealing for military but also civilian tasks. Such a passive radar system could exploit signals emitted by existing commercial television or radio stations or even satellite signals, such as the ones belonging to the GPS. The paper considers target locating and tracking using a network of passive receivers and/or non-cooperative illuminators (a multi-static radar configuration) by making use of the Doppler shift only. A novel concept, the systemic approach, is used to combine and interpret information available from different sensors. Both the formalization of the problem and the hardware and software implementation are presented. Implementation makes use of multi-component polynomial phase signal models and genetic algorithms. For increased performance, implementation on FPGA is envisaged. The paper ends with conclusions and perspectives.