Association of Critical, Infrequent Data

The Phase I project objective is to develop processing methods for improved processing of target tracks and classification with data from multiple, distributed sensors that includes so called vital (or critical) infrequent data. Vital infrequent data (VID) is measurement data that occurs infrequently but is critical (vital) for acceptable system functional performance. VID includes attribute measurements provided by some sensors in air defense that could improve the credibility of combat identification especially in the absence of IFF. Examples of attribute data include ESM and RWR observations. Alternatively, VID could be 2-D kinematic measurements provided by a sensor with a very slow target revisit rate. The time between arrivals of VID from a sensor might be fractions of an hour rather than a typical sensor that is factions of a minute. Processing VID would be simple and easy to design in the absence of close targets, false signals, and target maneuvers. Traditional processing would lead to misassociations of VID that would substantially degrade performance of fusion track and classification processing. Even advanced fusion processors as currently designed, such as multiple hypothesis trackers, would be too computation intensive if adjusted to accommodate the target revisit rate of VID.