A Multiple Hypothesis Tracker for a Distributed Network of Sensors

This paper describes the Multiple Hypothesis Network Tracker (MHNT) being developed by BAE Systems. The goal here was to design, develop and implement a tracker capable of tracking multiple vehicles moving across a network of geographically distributed static sensors, where each sensor's coverage area is small compared to the distance between sensors. Each sensor reports the time when a target crosses the sensor's coverage area Sensors may also report features associated with the target. A centralized tracker receives reports from all of the sensors and, using prior information regarding target motion across the network of sensors and actual travel times, assign reports to tracks and computes the most likely set of assignments. Presented at the International Conference on Information Fusion (9th) held in Florence, Italy on 10-13 July 2006. Published in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Fusion (9th), 2006. Sponsored by the International Society of Information Fusion (ISIF), Aerospace & Electronic Systems Society (AES), IEEE, ONR, ONR Global, Selex - Sistemi Integrati, Finmeccanica, BAE Systems, TNO, AFOSR's European Office of Aerospace Research and Development, and the NATO Undersea Research Centre.. The original document contains color images.