Discriminants for assigning passive bearing observations to radar targets

One area now beginning to receive attention is the pairing of radar targets and passive bearing observations made by radio-direction-finding (DF) equipment. In this paper the pairing problem is posed as a pattern recognition problem in which a particular signal whose direction of arrival is being measured by the DF equipment is to be classified as belonging to a particular radar target. This classification is performed by minimizing a discriminant function of the DF data and a radar target data set over all of the radar targets. Four discriminants are evaluated using a simple simulation. Theoretical performance curves are given for simplified versions of two discriminants.