Microwave Journal
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The Book End

January 1, 1999

The Book End

Tracking and Kalman Filtering Made Easy

Eli Brookner
John Wiley & Sons Inc.
477 pages; $74.95

Radar tracking and Kalman filtering need not be intimidating and difficult to understand; This book presents the subject in a clear and concise manner, making it much easier to grasp. The text emphasizes the physical and geometric aspects of radar filters as well as their mathematics. An abundance of design equations, procedures and curves allows the reader to design tracking filters quickly and test their performance using only a pocket calculator. The book is intended for engineers who are unfamiliar with radar tracking or are familiar with only one area of filtering.

The first part of the text describes g-h, g-h-k, a-b, a-b-g and Kalman filters. Chapter 1 presents an easy development of g-h filters for a simple constant velocity target in one-dimensional space. Chapter 2 introduces the Kalman filter and describes how it optimizes data. Chapter 3 covers the real-world problem of tracking in clutter as well as the use of the track-before-detect retrospective detector. Chapter 4 describes a simple formulation of the least-squares estimation problem and presents an explanation of the Gram-Schmidt voltage-processing method for solving this problem. Chapter 5 details the fixed-memory polynomial filter and a useful solution to the discrete-time orthogonal Legendre polynomial least-squares estimate for a given polynomial fit that is easily solved on a computer. Chapters 6 and 7 cover growing- and fading-memory filters, respectively, and Chapter 9 derives the Bayes filter. The voltage least-squares algorithms are revisited in Chapters 10 through 14.

Chapter 15 presents the case of time-varying target dynamics while Chapter 16 explains how a nonlinear motion equation may be linearized. Chapter 17 describes a technique for linearizing nonlinear observation equations and the last chapter revisits the Kalman filter as a minimization of a quadratic error function.

This book presents a straight-forward approach to radar-tracking filter design that will prove invaluable to engineers involved in radar system design and analysis. It also serves as an excellent text for graduate student course work in this area.

To order this book, contact:
John Wiley & Sons Inc.,
605 Third Avenue,
New York, NY 10158
(212) 850-6336 or (800) 225-5945.