Tracking of Multiple Spawning Targets with Heterogeneous Sensors for Seabed-To-Space Situational Awareness

Seabed-to-space situational awareness (S3A) aims to organize, fuse, and synthesize the massive volume of information collected from heterogeneous sensors, i.e., underwater, terrestrial, and space-based sensors, and therefrom extract knowledge thence available to defence operators, enabling informed decision-making. Heterogeneous sensors provide observations of targets in different domains (e.g., air, water surface, undersea), and with different modalities, perspectives, latencies, and update rates. They complement each other, and an effective approach is needed to combine the data they generate. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for multi-target tracking based on the sum-product algorithm (SPA) that models the different characteristics of the sensors and handles the appearance of targets in a complex multi-domain environment both through spontaneous births and through spawning from existing targets. The efficacy of this approach is demonstrated through a simulated maritime scenario informed by real-world observation streams.