Data Association and Target Tracking

To thread measurements (well, many call them “hits” or “plots”) of radar, sonar or imaging observations to a credible, smooth and reportable trajectory requires a filter. We’ll discuss those – Kalman, Unscented, particle, etc. – very briefly. But one cannot even begin to filter without knowing which hits come from which targets, and which hits are complete nonsense (clutter). When wrapped inside some scheme for such data-association, a filter becomes a tracker. This talk explains, at a fairly high level, the intuition behind some of the popular tracking algorithms.