Uniform versus nonuniform sampling when tracking in clutter

Many target tracking subsystems have the ability to schedule their own data rates; essentially they can "order" new information whenever they need it, and the cost is in terms of the sensor resource. But among the unmanaged schemes, uniform sampling, in which a new measurement is requested periodically and regularly, is the most commonly-used sampling scheme; deliberately nonuniform schemes are seldom given serious consideration. In this paper, however, we show that such schemes may have been discarded prematurely: a nonuniform sampling can have its benefits. Specifically, the nonuniform and uniform sampling schemes are compared for two kind of trackers: the probabilistic data association filter (PDAF), which updates its track based on a single scan of information at a time; and N-D assignment (an optimization-based implementation of the multi-hypothesis tracker (MHT)), in which the sliding window involves many scans of observations. We find that given the ground rule of maintenance of the same overall scan rate (i.e., the same sensor effort) uniform sampling is always optimal for the single-scan tracker in the sense of track life. However, nonuniform sampling can outperform uniform sampling if a more sophisticated multi-scan tracker is used, particularly when 1) the target has a high process noise, and/or 2) the false alarm density is high, and/or 3) the probability of detection is high.