Registration errors in a netted air surveillance system
September 2, 1980
Technical Report
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MIT Lincoln Laboratory Report TN-1980-40
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Summary
Today's tactical military air surveillance radars generally operate in a stand-alone configuration. The many performance improvements that result when data from multiple radars of this type are merged have made such netted operations an attractive goal for many years. A major obstacle to achieving this goal has traditionally been the difficulty associated with the registration of multisensor data, the expression of the data in a common coordinate system free from errors due to site uncertainty, antenna orientation, and improper alignment. This report presents the results of a modest effort to develop a self-registration procedure by which multiple radar sensors operating in consort each calculate the errors In their data by comparing it with data from the remainder of the system and then uses the information to upgrade performance. The technique has been tested with experimental data and appears quite capable of improving system performance, measured in terms of residual inter-site bias errors, by almost a factor of one hundred.