Abstract
The maritime industry is expanding at an alarming rate hence there is a perpetual need to improve situation awareness in the maritime environment using new and emerging technology. Tracking is one of the numerous ways of enhancing situation awareness by providing information that may be useful to the operator. The tracking module designed herein comprises determining existing states of high dynamic target warship, state prediction and state compensation due to random noise. This is achieved by first analyzing the process of tracking followed by design of a tracking algorithm that uses ${\alpha}-{\beta}-{\gamma}$ tracking filter under a random noise. The algorithm involves initializing the state parameters which include position, velocity, acceleration and the course. This is then followed by state prediction at each time interval. A weighted difference of the observed and predicted state values at the $n^{th}$ observation is added to the predicted state to obtain the smoothed (filtered) state. This estimation is subsequently employed to determine the predicted state in the next radar scan. The filtering coefficients ${\alpha}$, ${\beta}$ and ${\gamma}$ are determined from a pre-determined value of the damping parameter, ${\xi}$. The smoothed, predicted and the observed positions are used to compute the twice distance root mean square (2drms) error as a measure of the ability of the tracking module to manage the noise to acceptable levels.
