Track-to-track association in decentralized tracking systems with feedback

In air combat, information advantage over the opponent is vital for the success of the operation. For that reason, modern fighter aircraft have extensive sensor suites to track other objects. In order to form a unified picture of the vicinity; all sensor information is fused. Since system modularity and high computational performance are key issues in the application, a decentralized tracking approach, where the information from the decentralized trackers is fused in a central node, is preferable. Furthermore, in order to improve the sensor tracking performance, it is often desired to feed back information to the sensors from the central node. In this paper, track-to-track association in such a decentralized tracking system with feedback is addressed. The central fusion node has to associate the sensor tracks to each other to be able to fuse them. In a system without feedback, the track-to-track association algorithm bases its conclusions on the assumption that the estimation errors of the tracks from different local trackers are not correlated. However, when information is fed back to the local trackers, this assumption is not valid, since the sensor tracks then consist of common information. System configurations that deal with this problem are proposed and tested in a fighter aircraft application. One approach is to extract the uncorrelated information from the sensor data and use that in the association process. Another approach is to keep parallel trackers in the sensors that only contain the local sensor information. Both approaches produce sensor tracks that contain the same information as the sensor tracks in a system without feedback. Also, a track-to-track association algorithm that recursively uses information from multiple time steps is proposed. The use of multiple time step data separates it from conventional track-to-track association algorithms that mostly use only current information. The result is an algorithm that improves the performance and gives a more stable solution.