Error bounds for joint detection and estimation of multiple unresolved target-groups

• An error bound for JDE of multiple unresolved target-groups is derived by RFS.
• The bound is based on OSPA distance rather than Euclidean distance.
• The bound is discussed for the special cases when the group number is known or is at most one.
• Three examples are presented to verify the effectiveness of the bound.

According to random finite set (RFS) and information inequality, this paper derives an error bound for joint detection and estimation (JDE) of multiple unresolved target-groups in the presence of clutters and missed detections. The JDE here refers to determining the number of unresolved target-groups and estimating their states. In order to obtain the results of this paper, the states of the unresolved target-groups are modeled as a multi-Bernoulli RFS first. The point cluster model proposed by Mahler is used to describe the observation likelihood of each group. Then, the error metric between the true and estimated state sets of the groups is defined by the optimal sub-pattern assignment distance rather than the usual Euclidean distance. The maximum a posteriori detection and unbiased estimation criteria are used in deriving the bound. Finally, we discuss some special cases of the bound when the number of unresolved target-groups is known a priori or is at most one. Example 1 shows the variation of the bound with respect to the probability of detection and clutter density. Example 2 verifies the effectiveness of the bound by indicating the performance limitations of the cardinalized probability hypothesis density and cardinality balanced multi-target multi-Bernoulli filters for unresolved target-groups. Example 3 compares the bound of this paper with the (single-sensor) bound of [4] for the case of JDE of a single unresolved target-group. At present, this paper only addresses the static JDE problem of multiple unresolved target-groups. Our future work will study the recursive extension of the bound proposed in this paper to the filtering problems by considering the group state evolutions.