HF Radar ship tracking using
measurements from a single radar

While the distance and radial velocity measurements using simple HF radars are acceptable, the bearing measurements are typically noisy and can have large variations. Anacapa has developed a variation of the Unscented Kalman Filter (AUKF) that uses the radar measurements of the range, radial velocity and bearing from a single radar, to obtain a more accurate calculation of the ship position (both east and north coordinate) and velocity vector compared to using the range and bearing alone. This algorithm operates in real time and the new ship positions are updated at each time increment.

The video shows an example of this calculation:

The red line is actual ship track obtained from the Automatic Identification System (AIS) data.

The light blue line is the ship position calculated using only the range and bearing.

The black line is the ship position determined in real time by the AUKF and all the radar ship detections also passed the AUKF processing.

The radar observed the ship only during part of its path.