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In skywave over-the-horizon radar, the ionosphere often supports multiple propagation paths, and a single target can appear as a family of returns. This paper presents two new tracking approaches for this environment: The first uses measurement fusion, and the second uses group-target track-before-detect algorithm. In contrast to previous studies, we find that the biggest benefit is not improved detection sensitivity but rather associating the whole pattern of multipath returns significantly improves the ability to follow maneuvers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Track-Before-Detect (TkBD) is a paradigm that combines the target detection and estimation processes that are usually sequentially applied to sensor data in a conventional system. Existing literature uses only the envelope of complex data; this article presents an approach that also includes the phase information. The inclusion of phase is shown to both improve the discrimination of targets from noise and reduce the computation overhead, with improved performance demonstrated using three representative algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]