Multi-Hypothesis Tracking and fusion techniques for multistatic active sonar systems

In multistatic sonar systems data from several sensors are fused to obtain an improved tracking result compared to systems with a single source-receiver pair. Although centralised fusion leads to a theoretical optimal fusion result, distributed fusion features considerable advantages. As less data have to be passed to a fusion node, distributed fusion requires less bandwidth to transmit data as well as less computational load to process the data compared to centralised fusion. In this paper a distributed fusion approach is presented without performing a track-to-track association. Fusion is done by applying an additional Multi-Hypothesis Tracker to track states filtered at the single sensor stages. The presented fusion technique is applied to two distinct multistatic sonar datasets and compared to a centralised fusion approach.