The Effect of K-Distributed Clutter on Trackability
Steven Schoenecker, Peter Willett, Yaakov Bar‐Shalom · IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing · 2015
In the field of target tracking, a tremendous amount of work has been done on designing and implementing algorithms. However, much less work has been performed on analyzing whether, for a given target in a given environment, tracking is possible at all. Our recent work developed a framework to answer just that. But the only clutter amplitude model it could process was Rayleigh. On the other hand, the K-distribution, much heavier-tailed than Rayleigh, has recently been posited to more accurately describe “real” sonar clutter. In this paper, we incorporate K-distributed clutter into the trackability framework, and the differences are significant. We find we answer the question, “When tracking a target, does using amplitude actually help?”