Discrimination power control in military surveillance applications

The paper addresses the problem of target-tracking in tactical military surveillance operations. More specifically, a closed-loop approach to adapt the sensing and tracking operations is proposed and compared to the conventional open-loop and static approach. The objective is to control and maintain, over a certain volume of interest and by way of clustering and scheduling strategies, the level of discrimination power required by the mission objectives. The control strategy is based on two cascade loops. The outer loop uses clustering techniques to characterize the volume of interest in terms of discrimination power. This high level information is exploited by the inner loop to compute optimal track update frequency and sensor scheduling strategy.