Simulations studies of multisensor track association and fusion methods

Recent work has developed maximum likelihood (ML) methods for track-to-track data association and fusion in a multisensor, i.e., more than two sensor, environment. In order to conserve bandwidth, only the state estimates and corresponding covariance matrices are shared amongst the nodes. The fusion engine uses this track information to determine which tracks associate to the same target and then computes a fused track to improve the accuracy of the state estimates. The simplest class of ML methods assumes that the track errors from different sensors are uncorrelated. The more computationally demanding ML methods incorporate the cross-correlations that are due to the common process noise in the kinematic model of the target. In order to account for track correlations in practice, the cross-covariance matrices must be approximated from the single sensor covariance matrices. This paper introduces new methods to approximate the cross-covariance matrices, and these approximations lead to a third class of association and estimation methods. The paper then uses simulations to assess the performance of the different association and estimation techniques. The simulations include results when the sensor tracks are produced by either a Kalman filter or an interacting multiple model (IMM) filter