Counting Technique versus Single-Time Test for Track-to-Track Association

Abstract

Standard hypothesis tests for track-to-track association depend on the state estimates and covariances of the individual tracks. Unfortunately, covariances are not always available from the individual tracking systems. An alternative approach that can be used in such cases is a counting technique, where the number of good matches is used as a test statistic. In this paper, we compare the counting technique with a conventional hypothesis test in simulations for a fusion system designed to fuse maritime radar tracks with tracks from the automatic identification system. Since the data association of the radar tracking system inevitably makes it nontrivial to decide on a ground truth, we also propose a ground truth assessment scheme using a sliding window approach. The results indicate that the counting technique performs at par with the hypothesis test under certain tracking conditions. If an initialization time of several seconds is allowed, the counting technique may under certain conditions outperform the hypothesis test in terms of true-positive rate and false-positive rate.