Serendipitous Events in Tracking and Classification

Abstract

Real-world tracking applications encounter circumstances not well modeled in previous chapters. The location sensors might be partially or completely obscured rendering the target invisible. With some knowledge of the terrain and perhaps the placement of well-located features such as buildings, bridges, and tunnels, the tracker can be modified to generate more faithful assurance regions. Isolated temporal events are hard to incorporate into conventional command algorithms. For example, if a hostile target enters a tunnel, the kinematic measurements are interrupted and performance degrades during the period the target is hidden. But what if the location of the tunnel entrance were known from a road map? Ingress could be used to excise certain state errors. Or the map might restrict egress to a few known locations with a useful motion constraint. Ingress and egress are serendipitous events that can be used in a hybrid-tracking algorithm to improve the tracking quality. In this chapter, a particular engagement is chosen to illustrate the utility of event inclusion. The following analysis is quite detailed and engagement specific. The encounter is chosen to illustrate the advantage of integrating random but isolated events into the computation of assurance regions and not to form a definitive template for broad command algorithms. The reader should reflect on the algorithmic adjustments made here, and see how similar adjustments might be made in similar applications.