Online hierarchical recognition method for target tactical intention in beyond-visual-range air combat

Online accurate recognition of target tactical intention in beyond-visual-range (BVR) air combat is an important basis for deep situational awareness and autonomous air combat decision-making, which can create pre-emptive tactical opportunities for the fighter to gain air superiority. The existing methods to solve this problem have some defects such as dependence on empirical knowledge, difficulty in interpreting the recognition results, and inability to meet the requirements of actual air combat. So an online hierarchical recognition method for target tactical intention in BVR air combat based on cascaded support vector machine (CSVM) is proposed in this study. Through the mechanism analysis of BVR air combat, the instantaneous and cumulative feature information of target trajectory and relative situation information are introduced successively using online automatic decomposition of target trajectory and hierarchical progression. Then the hierarchical recognition model from target maneuver element, tactical maneuver to tactical intention is constructed. The CSVM algorithm is designed for solving this model, and the computational complexity is decomposed by the cascaded structure to overcome the problems of convergence and timeliness when the dimensions and number of training samples are large. Meanwhile, the recognition result of each layer can be used to support the composition analysis and interpretation of target tactical intention. The simulation results show that the proposed method can effectively realize multi-dimensional online accurate recognition of target tactical intention in BVR air combat.