Improved Contact Association

The US Navy is developing an Undersea Warfare Decision Support System (USW-DSS), the purpose of which is to provide a net-centric capability to support fleet commanders. A significant advantage the architecture will provide is the integration of the C4I domain and the combat systems. Since many different types of sensors will be integrated, a fundamental need is a robust mechanism for the association and fusion the multi-sensor data and for generating a Common Operational Picture (COP). Classical approaches to association only use kinematic data, and feature data, measured by the individual sensors, may be used to augment the kinematic data to assist in the association problem. The objective of this program is to develop a feature/classification-aided track association algorithm that is compatible with the following: (i) the non-commensurate track and feature data that is common for the sensors expected in the USW-DSS architecture; (ii) the requirements for implementing the COP architecture; (iii) the requirements for implementing multi-hypothesis tracking. The solution will be evaluated using an extensive multi-sensor simulation suite, and a variety of metrics will be applied to assess tracking the communication link load performance.