Hypothesis management in situation assessment

Everitt, R. G. and Marrs, A. D. (2003) Hypothesis management in situation assessment. In: IEEE Aerospace Conference 2003, pp. 1895-1903. doi: 10.1109/AERO.2003.1235120

Abstract/Summary

A situation assessment uses reports from sensors to produce hypotheses about a situation at a level of aggregation that is of direct interest to a military commander. A low level of aggregation could mean forming tracks from reports, which is well documented in the tracking literature as track initiation and data association. In this paper there is also discussion on higher level aggregation; assessing the membership of tracks to larger groups. Ideas used in joint tracking and identification are extended, using multi-entity Bayesian networks to model a number of static variables, of which the identity of a target is one. For higher level aggregation a scheme for hypothesis management is required. It is shown how an offline clustering of vehicles can be reduced to an assignment problem.