Tracking an unknown number of targets based on multipath measurements provided by an over-the-horizon radar (OTHR) network with a statistical ionospheric model is complicated, which requires solving four subproblems: target detection, target tracking, multipath data association and ionospheric height identification. A joint solution is desired since the four subproblems are highly correlated, but suffering from the intractable inference problem of high-dimensional latent variables. In this paper, a unified message passing approach, combining belief propagation (BP) and mean-field (MF) approximation, is developed for simplifying the intractable inference. Based upon the factor graph corresponding to a factorization of the joint probability distribution function (PDF) of the latent variables and a choice for a separation of this factorization into BP region and MF region, the posterior PDFs of continuous latent variables including target kinematic state, target visibility state, and ionospheric height, are approximated by MF due to its simple MP update rules for conjugate-exponential models. With regard to discrete multipath data association which contains one-to-one frame (hard) constraints, its PDF is approximated by loopy BP. Finally, the approximated posterior PDFs are updated iteratively in a closed-loop manner, which is effective for dealing with the coupling issue among target detection, target tracking, multipath data association, and ionospheric height identification. Meanwhile, the proposed approach has the measurement-level fusion architecture due to the direct processing of the raw multipath measurements from an OTHR network, which is benefit to improving target tracking performance. Its performance is demonstrated on a simulated OTHR network multitarget tracking scenario.
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