Multihypothesis tracking using incoherent signal-strength information

Multihypothesis tracking (MHT) methods have been suggested to track targets on the basis of noisy target locations over a background of false detections. Assuming a standard fluctuation model of the target cross section MHT methods are generalized to additionally incorporate signal-strength information (incoherent) provided by the detection process. The detection threshold has been selected to optimize track performance. The impact of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on the tracking task has been analyzed in order to identify SNR conditions which call for refined tracking methods like MHT. By this we also get an estimate of the improvement achieved by MHT techniques over more standard approaches.