Doppler-Only Extended Target Tracking in a Distributed Antenna System

Abstract

In modern radar and Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) systems, the conventional point-scatterer assumption becomes increasingly inaccurate due to higher spatial resolution. In this context, Extended Target Tracking (ETT) has grown interest in recent years. However, most existing ETT works are designed for monostatic systems due to the fine time synchronisation or per-node antenna arrays required for ranging and angle estimation in multistatic scenarios. In contrast, this paper proposes a novel approach to extended target tracking in a distributed antenna system, where only bistatic Doppler frequency measurements are available. Doppler-only tracking is particularly attractive as it avoids the two aforementioned issues. To address this Doppler-only extended target tracking problem, we develop a modified Rao-Blackwellised Particle Filter (RBPF) that replaces the standard Kalman update with a particle-specific Extended Kalman Filter update followed by a relinearisation step, handling the non-linearities of both the rigid extended target dynamics and the observation model. Numerical simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for accurate extended target tracking under this Doppler-only setting.