Track-Before-Detect Algorithm for Multiple Target Detection

Vision-based collision avoidance system for air traffic management requires a excellent multiple target detection algorithm under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels. The track-before-detect (TBD) approaches have significant applications such as detection of small and dim targets from an image sequence. In this paper, two detection algorithms with the TBD approaches are proposed to satisfy the multiple target detection requirements. The first algorithm, based on a dynamic programming approach, is designed to classify multiple targets by using a k-means clustering algorithm. In the second approach, a hidden Markov model (HMM) is slightly modified for detecting multiple targets sequentially. Both of the proposed approaches are used in numerical simulations with variations in target appearance properties to provide satisfactory performance as multiple target detection methods.