Fuzzy track-to-track association and track fusion approach in distributed multisensor–multitarget multiple-attribute environment

A great deal of attention is currently focused on multisensor data fusion. Multisensor data fusion combines data from multiple sensor systems to achieve improved performance and provide more inferences than could be achieved using a single sensor system. One of the most important aspects of it is track-to-track-association. This paper develops a fuzzy data fusion approach to solve the problem of track-to-track association and track fusion in distributed multisensor–multitarget multiple-attribute environments in overlapping coverage scenarios. The proposed approach uses the fuzzy clustering means algorithm to reduce the number of target tracks and associate duplicate tracks by determining the degree of membership for each target track. It uses current sensor data and the known sensor resolutions for track-to-track association, track fusion, and the selection of the most accurate sensor for tracking fused targets. Numerical results based on Monte Carlo simulations are presented. The results show that the proposed approach significantly reduces the computational complexity and achieves considerable performance improvement compared to Euclidean clustering. We also show that the performance of the proposed approach is reasonable close to the performance of the Bayesian minimum mean square error criterion.