Target perceivability and its applications

A concept of target perceivability is introduced, which is related to such concepts as target existence and target observability. Its probability provides a basis for an integrated approach to track initiation, confirmation, termination, and refinement of track maintenance algorithms. This paper proposes the concepts of target perceivability and presents a recursion of its probability based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) and their applications to tracker analysis, development, and design, in particular, in the context of the probabilistic data association (PDA) method. Specifically, several important quantities and track life are analyzed; a perceivability-based probabilistic approach to track confirmation and termination is proposed; two versions of perceivability-based PDA trackers are presented. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate their performance