A system for characterizing a moving object performs a cluster trajectory orientation process associated with clusters of detected points in each of a set of scans to estimate the heading of a non-point target. The cluster trajectory orientation process performs a principal component analysis on a corresponding position data matrix representing coordinates of the clusters of points for each of a set of scans and compares resulting eigenvectors to a heading of the cluster averages to generate a heading estimate. The heading estimate is combined with velocity estimates from a point target based tracking process and a Doppler-azimuth profile process in a weighted combination based on target attributes to improve the accuracy and performance of the system.