Evaluation of Acceleration and Jerk Models in Radar and IRST Data Fusion for Tracking Evasive Maneuvering Target

In general, the motion of maneuvering targets is described by acceleration model which is a kinematic model including position derivatives up to the second order. It is found that for tracking highly maneuvering targets, it is necessary to include higher order position derivatives in the model. A model including derivatives of position up to the third order called the jerk model is presented. In this paper, the tracking performance of an extended Kalman filter with the jerk model is evaluated and compared with that of an extended Kalman filter with acceleration model for fusion and tracking of a maneuvering target sensed by IRST and radar.