Partially decentralized architecture for fusing active (radar) and passive (infrared) measurement data
David van Huyssteen, Mohamad Farooq · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1999
A common approach to fusing measurements of differing dimensions is to employ a sequential Kalman filter. The sequential filter is particularly appropriate in the case of asynchronous measurement; however, it is likely to diverge should any one of the sensors degrade. As an alternative, this paper present a partially decentralized or augmented track architecture characterized by multiple local tracks. In order to fuse the information provuded by a pulse Doppler radar (range and angle) with that of an infrared imager (angle only), the latter 'incomplete' measurement is augmented by assigning it to a pseudo-range term prior to track-level fusion. This configuration offers a potential advantage in terms of robustness, in that the local radar track cannot be contaminated if the imager's measurements degrade. A simulation of the proposed architecture is included, and the results are compared to those achieved with a sequential filter for the same scenarios. A variety of data rates are used. In the general case, the partially decentralized filter requires additional time alignment logic to prepare the separate radar and imager tracks for the fusion process. The ultimate goal of this investigation is to determine if the partially decentralized filter is a suitable alternative to the sequential filter, and to investigate a possible application to the Canadian Forces' Light Armored Vehicle Reconnaissance Variant.