Distributed MHT with Passive Sensors

Abstract

This paper focuses on two challenges in multi-target tracking with passive sensors. The first is the well-known observability problem whereby individual sensor measurements are insufficient to localize targets. The second is the need to relax the usual small-target assumption of at most one measurement per target per scan. Indeed, in some applications such as passive sonar, there are repeated measurements, i.e. multiple detections per target per scan of one sensor. We examine these challenges in a multi-sensor setting and describe the advantages of a distributed MHT solution architecture, with measurement-space tracking following by multi-sensor Cartesian tracking using a robust Cartesian initialization scheme. In the presence of repeated measurements, there are (at least) two viable processing architectures. In both cases we leverage a recently developed generalization to the MHT recursion. We study the relative merits of the two alternative solutions.