An Alternative to the Mahalanobis Distance for Determining Optimal Correspondences in Data Association

The most common criteria to determine data association rely on minimizing the squared Mahalanobis distance (SMD) between observations and predictions. We hold that the SMD is just a heuristic, while the alternative matching likelihood is the optimal statistic to be maximized. Thorough experiments undoubtedly confirm this idea, with false positive reductions of up to 16%.