Computing association probabilities using parallel Boltzmann machines

A new computational method is presented for solving the data association problem using parallel Boltzmann machines. It is shown that the association probabilities can be computed with arbitrarily small errors if a sufficient number of parallel Boltzmann machines are available. The probability β_i^j that the i th measurement emanated from the jth target can be obtained simply by observing the relative frequency with which neuron v(i,j) in a two-dimensional network is on throughout the layers. Some simple tracking examples comparing the performance of the Boltzmann algorithm to the exact data association solution and with the performance of an alternative parallel method using the Hopfield neural network are also presented