Measurement level AIS/radar fusion

In this work, a new measurement-level fusion algorithm to combine radar and AIS messages is proposed using the Joint Probabilistic Data Association (JPDA) framework. The proposed method handles AIS ID swaps between vessels and missing IDs while effectively fusing the radar measurements with AIS messages at measurement level. The uncertainty in the AIS ID-to-track assignment is resolved by assigning multiple AIS IDs to a target and updating the ID probabilities using a Bayesian inference with radar measurements, AIS messages and other targets. The performance of the proposed measurement-level fusion is compared with that of the track-to-track fusion. A modified Posterior Cramér-Rao Lower Bound (PCRLB) is also derived for the variable-rate heterogenous AIS/Radar network. Experimental results based on simulated data demonstrate the performance of the proposed technique.