This Article is Originally Post by The Hindu All flying objects in the Indian airspace — commercial aircraft, missiles, drones, fighter planes, and others — are detected and tracked by ground-based radars produced by public sector unit BEL.
The current system used by the Indian Air Force relies on a Multi-Sensor Tracking (MST) mechanism via radars located in different parts of the country with information such as location and velocity coordinates captured by each radar collated to provide the Air Situation Picture (ASP).
ASP is a detailed listing of all aircraft in the airspace along with their corresponding flight numbers and flight plans. But, overlapping radars and delay in communication between sensors lead to a ‘merging’ error – a situation where multiple aircraft in close proximity to each other in the airspace are incorrectly identified as one.
Another is ‘splitting’ — where a single aircraft is sensed as multiple and erroneously flagged as a threat. From a security point of view, threat detection and evaluation need to be spot-on but due to these errors, the ASP generated is not 100% accurate.
A team from BEL-Ghaziabad comprising Roshan Kumar, Rohit Singh, Aravind Kumar, and Manoj Tyagi approached the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT)-Hyderabad, for the development of an automated solution to address these issues.
