presents a review of the literature on manoeuvre detector algorithms for application to target tracking. the algorithms that are described are applicable to the tracking of aircraft, ships, and missiles by both track-while-scan and continuous tracking radars. a brief mention is made of the use of doppler information in target tracking. five algorithms are chosen for further study' the simple kalman filter, the singer filter, the algorithm of bar-shalom and birmiwal which switches between these filters on the detection of the start and finish of a manoeuvre, the method of moose et al which combines the estimates from several kalman filters with different acceleration inputs, and the alphabeta filter plus manoeuvre detector algorithm proposed by quigley and holmes. the tracking performance of each algorithm is evaluated by looking at two computer simulated target trajectories that are typical of a manoeuvering aircraft. in these examples, the tracking is done in two dimensions. it is concluded that the algorithm of bar-shalom and birmiwal gives the best overall tracking performance, but the alphabeta tracker provides the best compromise between performance and computational load