Fusion of radar and imaging sensor data for target tracking
J. B. Romine, Edward W. Kamen, Chellury Ram Sastry · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1994
This paper deals with the fusing of data from radar and imaging sensors at the dynamic level by generating a common state and observation model that relates the measurements to the common state vector. A key point which is taken into account in the paper is the fact that a radar provides center-of-reflection measurements that may not correspond very well to the true target center, and as the target aspect changes, the center-of-reflection may vary about the true target center. For small targets at long range, this effect may be negligible, but for semi- extended or extended objects, the mismatch must be considered. In the approach developed in the paper, the radar center-of-reflection measurements are modeled in terms of random perturbations of unknown constant off-sets from the true target center in spherical coordinates. Estimate of these off-sets are used in an extended Kalman filter approach to target tracking using radar and imaging sensor data. The performance of the resulting tracking filter is evaluated via computer simulations.