Smoothing innovations and data association with IPDA

Surveillance sensors return detections from targets as well as the clutter measurements. Data association algorithms often use innovations to discriminate between the target and the clutter measurements. Reducing the covariance of innovations reduces the surveillance area from which measurements are used, reducing the number of clutter measurements. This paper introduces smoothing innovations which reduce innovation covariance, and improve the data association performance. This concept is applied to the Integrated Probabilistic Data Association (IPDA) to produce a Smoothing IPDA (sIPDA). sIPDA trajectory estimation errors are reduced with a smoothing delay. A surprising outcome is that sIPDA improves the false track discrimination in real time (without the smoothing delay).