Tracking of Airplane Wake Vortices Based  on Linear Spatial Distribution Mode

Radar detection and tracking of the low signal-noise-ratio aircraft wake vortices have become an important direction in aviation safety and airport capacity. Usually low-threshold detection can improve the detection performance of the weak wake vortices, but large false alarm rate may cause the tracker to be disabled. Based on the linear spatial distribution model, the wake vortices tracking algorithm was put proposed to estimate the wake track. First, the whole wake is regarded as a linear target of joint motion, the function between measurement likelihood and wake states such as center, slope angle, and length is got, and it is helpful to carry out data association when the wake measurement number changed and in dense multi-return environments. Then, the states of the whole wake were estimated using particle filtering. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can accurately estimates the real wake states in the condition of low-threshold detection. This research is helpful to the wake return identification using the wake vortex characteristics in airport application and early warning system.