The multipath propagation of skywave over-the-horizon radar (OTHR) in target tracking makes the tracking filter in radar coordinate inevitably produce several tracks for a single target
and the propagation modes of the tracks are not determinate.The target state in ground coordinate can be obtained by the association of tracks
propagation modes and targets
and track fusion.Other problems of OTHR are low detection probabilities
low measurement accuracy and low data-sampling rate
which usually results in track absence in some radar dwells or the case that tracks of some modes may be never initialized.An adaptive OTHR multipath track fusion algorithm is proposed
which decides the optimal association of tracks
propagation modes and targets by the information of present time and the historical information.The mode association hypothesis of each step is modified with new data cumulating.The simulation results show that the algorithm of this paper can greatly decrease the state estimation error
compared with the multihypothesis fusion of multipath OTHR tracks algorithm.