Multi-Hypothesis Tracking and fusion techniques for multistatic active sonar systems

Abstract

In multistatic sonar systems data from several sensors are fused to obtain an improved tracking result compared to systems with a single source-receiver pair. Although centralised fusion leads to a theoretical optimal fusion result, distributed fusion features considerable advantages. As less data have to be passed to a fusion node, distributed fusion requires less bandwidth to transmit data as well as less computational load to process the data compared to centralised fusion. In this paper a distributed fusion approach is presented without performing a track-to-track association. Fusion is done by applying an additional Multi-Hypothesis Tracker to track states filtered at the single sensor stages. The presented fusion technique is applied to two distinct multistatic sonar datasets and compared to a centralised fusion approach.