In this paper, the problem of target detection and tracking utilizing the single frequency network (SFN) is addressed. Specifically, by exploiting the characteristics of the signal in SFN, a novel likelihood model which avoids the measurement origin uncertain problem in the point measurement model is proposed. The particle filter based track-before-detect (PF-TBD) algorithm is adopted for the proposed SFN likelihood to detect and track the possibly existed target. The advantage of using TBD algorithm is that it is suitable for the condition of low SNR, and specially, in SFN, it can avoid the data association between the measurement and the transmitters. The performance of the adopted algorithm is examined via simulations.

Weak target detection is a key problem in passive bistatic radar (PBR). Track-before-detect (TBD) is an effective solution which has drawn much attention recently. However, TBD has not been fully developed in PBR. In this paper, the transition function and the selection of parameters in dynamic programming are analyzed in PBR. Then a novel processing scheme of dynamic programming based TBD is proposed to reduce the computation complexity without severely decreasing the detection performance. Discussions including complexity, detection performance, threshold determination, selection of parameters and detection of multitarget, are presented in detail. The new method can provide fast implementation with only a slight performance penalty. In addition, good multitarget detection performance can be achieved by using this method. Simulations are carried out to present the performance of the proposed processing scheme.

Dynamic Programming (DP) based Track-Before-Detect (TBD) algorithm is effective in detecting low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) targets. However, its complexity increases exponentially as the dimension of the target state space increases, so the exact implementation of DP-TBD will become computationally prohibitive if the state dimension is more than two or three, which greatly prevents its applications to many realistic problems. In order to improve the computational efficiency of DP-TBD, a thresholding process based DP-TBD (TP-DP-TBD) is proposed in this paper. In TP-DP-TBD, a low threshold is first used to eliminate the noise-like (with low-amplitude) measurements. Then the DP integration process is modified to only focuses on the thresholded higher-amplitude measurements, thus huge amounts of computation devoted to the less meaningful low-amplitude measurements are saved. Additionally, a merit function transfer process is integrated into DP recursion to guarantee the inheritance and utilization of the target merits. The performance of TP-DP-TBD is investigated under both optical style Cartesian model and surveillance radar model. The results show that substantial computation reduction is achieved with limited performance loss, consequently TP-DP-TBD provides a cost-efficient tradeoff between computational cost and performance. The effect of the merit function transfer on performance is also studied.