Joint Integrated PDA Avoiding Track Coalescence under Non-Homogeneous Clutter Density

Joint PDA has proven to be effective in tracking multiple targets from measurements amidst clutter and missed detections. Joint IPDA has built upon this by including the probability of target existence as a track quality measure to enable automatic tracking and track maintenance. Both JPDA and JIPDA suffer from the problem of track coalescence of near target tracks. JPDA* is an extension of JPDA which avoids coalescence by pruning specific permutation hypotheses prior to hypothesis merging. Following JPDA*'s descriptor system derivation, this paper developes JIPDA*, an extension of JIPDA which avoids track coalescence. JIPDA* updates the probability of target existence as the track quality measure. An initial simulation study corroborates the effectiveness of this approach for tracking crossing targets in heavy clutter