A Functional Quadratic Form Distance for Multi-Target Tracking Performance Assessment

A multi-object miss-distance is proposed for performance evaluation of multi-target tracking algorithms based on a quadratic form for functions. The distance is in the form of a bilinear functional. In this article we consider the functional in the context of multi-target tracking applications and errors between the following (i) two sets of points; (ii) a set of points and a point process intensity; and (iii) two point process intensities. The metric is motivated for performance assessment methods for assessing association errors between sets of targets and multi-target tracking estimates.