Track-to-Track AIS / Radar Association and Uncertainty Estimation by Coherent Point Drift

Multiple sensors, such as AIS and radar, are used to monitor nearby ships during maritime surveillance operations. The data from these sensors must be associated so as to accurately locate the targets and identify their behavior, while taking into account the presence of potential sensor biases. Several algorithms exist in the state-of-the-art to solve this association problem. However, few of them allow the sensor biases to be corrected. This paper adapts the coherent point drift method to the association of AIS and radar tracks while taking into account the radar uncertainty. The proposed adaptation is based on an expectation-maximization algorithm that jointly estimates the bias of the radar sensor with respect to the AIS sensor (in polar coordinates), the radar and AIS uncertainties and solves the association problem. The performance of this algorithm is evaluated using AIS and radar tracks obtained from numerous scenarios yielding promising results.