Track-to-track association using informative prior associations

In a single-frame track-to-track association, due to the local sensors track swapping (switching of the track from an estimated target to another estimated target, under measurement uncertainty conditions), the identities of the fused tracks over several frames are not preserved. The main goal of the proposed track-to-track association method is to link the histories of fused tracks over several frames and avoid track swapping at the fusion center level (e.g. to preserve the continuity of the fused tracks through their identities). In this method, the previous association hypotheses are taken as priors in a multiple-hypothesis association chain. The continuity of the fused tracks over several frames is achieved through the prediction of the fused tracks obtained from a set of best association hypotheses at each frame. Through this, if in computing the fused tracks estimation errors, their identities are taken into account (e.g. the errors of a fused track over all the frames are computed with respect to the same true target), this procedure will improve also the fused track state estimation error. The method and implementation proposed is intended to be used to identify the histories of two or more tracks at the fusion center, and possibly to improve the track-to-track association.