Simulation assessment of RCS-aided multiple target tracking
Darin T. Dunham, Lisa M. Ehrman, William Dale Blair, Susan A. Frost · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2007
Closely-spaced (but resolved) targets pose a significant challenge for single-frame unique measurement-to-track data association algorithms. This is due to the similarity of the Mahalanobis distances between the closely-spaced measurements and tracks. Contrary to conventional wisdom, adding target feature information (e.g., target amplitude) does not necessarily improve the probability of correctly assigning measurements to tracks. In this paper, the theoretical limitations of using radar cross section (RCS) data to aid in measurement-totrack association are reviewed. The results of a high-fidelity simulation assessment of the benefits of RCSaided measurement-to-track association (using the Signal-to-Noise Ratio) are given and other possibilities for RCS-aided tracking are discussed. Namely, we show the analytical results of our investigation into using RCS information to determine the presence of merged measurements.