Standard radar detection process requires that the sensor output is compared to a predetermined threshold. The threshold is selected based on a-priori knowledge available and/or certain assumptions. However, any knowledge and/or assumptions become inadequate due to the presence of multiple targets with varying signal return and usually non stationary background. Thus, any fixed predefined threshold may result in either increased false alarm rate or increased track loss. Even approaches where the threshold is adaptively varied will not perform well in situations when the signal return from the target of interest is too low compared to the average level of the background. Track-before-detect (TBD) techniques eliminate the need for a detection threshold and provide detecting and tracking targets with lower signal-to-noise ratios than standard methods. However, although TBD techniques eliminate the need for detection threshold at sensor's signal processing stage, they often use tuning thresholds at the output of the filtering stage. This paper presents a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based target detection method that avoids any thresholding at any stage of the detection process. Moreover, since the proposed HMM method is based on the target motion models, the output of the detection process can easily be employed for manoeuvring target tracking.
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