Perspectives for a backbone technology: tracking in real-world applications

Over four decades, target tracking has evolved into a mature discipline acting as a backbone for emerging engineering applications. Illustrated by examples, we discuss along which lines tracking is likely to evolve into a key technology enabling design and development of real-world surveillance and control systems. Four aspects are of particular importance: 1) extraction of higher JDL level information on target characteristics from precision tracks, 2) tracking-derived anomaly detection, 3) exploitation of attribute information from poor resolution sensors over a time window, 4) in-depth integration of context information enabling information extraction even from unwanted propagation phenomena.