Multiple Frame Assignment Tracking of Surface Targets

Defense against asymmetric threats such as small surface swarms is an important area of concern. For homeland security, drug trafficking surveillance, and the protection of Navy assets it is necessary to track these highly maneuverable targets, perhaps in large numbers. This requires a tracking system that provides high-fidelity correlation and state estimation in real-time and in the presence of merged measurements, high false alarm rates, and temporal target occlusion. Numerica has developed state-of-the-art tracking systems for air and missile defense based on its Multiple Frame Assignment (MFA) data correlation method. Phase I adapted this algorithm to the surface target tracking problem and demonstrated good performance on challenging scenarios. The proposed Phase II will fully mature this algorithm and transition it to a COTS ROTS. To support Navy's development of ship self-defense weapons systems two additional algorithm developments will be pursued: (i) merged measurement processing for mechanically scanned radar and (ii) assessment of data association ambiguity to compute interceptor guide-to-regions. The Phase II product will satisfy Navy's need for an advanced tracking solution in the littoral against asymmetric threats. The algorithm is adapted from a network-centric algorithm and thus may serve more general tracking needs within Navy's envisioned network-centric warfare concepts.