Patent ID: 8405540

Claim:
A method for detecting a target in a sequence of radar images, wherein each image is partitioned into a. grid of cells, and wherein each cell has a. corresponding position in an image coordinate system associated with a location in a world coordinate system, comprising: determining, for each most recent image in a sliding temporal window of the sequence of images, intensities of each cell, wherein each cell has the corresponding position in the image coordinate system associated with the location in a world coordinate system; storing a subset of the cells having highest intensities as a set of current needles, wherein each needle in the current set of needles has the corresponding position in the image coordinate system associated with the location in the world coordinate system; determining a set of hypotheses, obtained by using a state transition model and corresponding maximum limits, for the current set of needles, wherein each hypotheses for each needle in the current set of needles has the corresponding position in the image coordinate system associated with the location in the world coordinate system; appending the current set of hypotheses, to a set of queues, wherein there is one queue for each corresponding cell position in the final image, wherein the corresponding position is each cell in the final image is associated with the location in the world coordinate system; updating hypotheses for the previous sets of needles to the corresponding set of queues; and selecting a maximum likelihood in the set of queues to detect the location of targets, wherein the current position associated with the queue with the maximum likelihood corresponds to the locations of the targets in the world coordinate system, wherein the steps are performed in a processor.