Data fusion for a surveillance system: addressing some practical problems

This paper presents solutions for some data fusion problems encountered in a real life command and control system and outlines the systems engineering approach used while addressing these problems. The systems engineering approach takes into account the functionality and the capabilities of the system, operational and user aspects, safety and security, subsystem interfaces, sustainability and design constraints. The system comprises several sensor points scattered around a vast region that collect radar plots and produce tracks and two central command points that receive these tracks and process them. The processing of tracks involve carrying the tracks obtained from geographically dispersed sensors onto a common reference point (e.g. coordinate conversion and registration), fusing the tracks originating from the same target provide full air picture of the surveillance region. Also, the proposed system reproduces the track states and corresponding covariance matrix from the track quality information.