Tracking Multiple Evolving Threats with Cluttered Surveillance Observations
Zachariah Sutton, Peter Willett, Yaakov Bar‐Shalom · 2018
Many threats in the form of human actions (terrorist attacks, military actions, etc.) can be stochastically modeled by someone with relevant expert knowledge. In this work, a threat is taken to be a sequence of actions that evolve over time and culminate at some ultimate goal. A model would be a hypothesis as to how a threat would develop, and what kind of observable evidence it would produce along the way. This modeling method allows us to attempt detection using the preliminary evidence of a threat. This would theoretically allow the user to take preemptive action; i.e. the user can interfere with the threat before its culmination. This work presents a method of stochastically modeling these types of processes using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). We then present a detection scheme based on random finite set (RFS) filters (Bernoulli filters) that allows for detection of multiple threat processes using a single cluttered stream of observed data.