SME filter approach to sensor fusion in multiple target tracking
Edward W. Kamen, Chellury Ram Sastry, C. K. Sword · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1993
The SME filter approach to multiple target tracking (MTT) is extended to the case when position measurements are provided by more than one sensor. In this approach to MTT, there is no need to consider target/measurement associations or sensor-to-sensor correlations. The SME filter is generated for the case of N targets and M sensors, with the target motions assumed to consist of random perturbations about constant-velocity trajectories. The key idea of the SME approach is to form a new measurement vector by taking sums-of-products of the Cartesian coordinate measurements generated from spherical coordinate measurements provided by each sensor. The new measurement vectors at each sensor are either 'summed' or 'stacked' to form a composite measurement vector in each coordinate. This results in a 'sum SME filter' and a 'stack SME filter'. A computer simulation is given which shows that the stack SME filter can result in much better performance than that of the sum SME filter.