<title>Performance assessment and comparison of various tracklet methods for maneuvering targets</title>

A tracklet is the estimate of a target state or track that is equivalent to an estimate based only a few measurements. Typically, tracklets are considered to reduce the communications costs between sensors and remote global or fusion trackers. The literature includes several methods for computing tracklets. Some of the methods compute tracklets from measurements, while others compute tracklets from the sensor-level tracks. Some of the methods ignore or omit process noise from the modeling, while others methods attempt to address the presence of process noise. The tracking of maneuvering targets requires the inclusion of process noise. When a tracklet that was developed for nonmaneuvering targets (<i>i.e</i>., no process noise) is used for tracking maneuvering targets, the errors of the tracklet will be somewhat cross-correlated with data from other sensors for the same target, and it is referred to as a quasi-tracklet. Due to some important practical considerations, the impact of maneuvering targets on the performance of tracklets has not been thoroughly addressed in the literature. An investigation that includes the critical practical considerations requires computer simulations with realistic target maneuvers and pertinent evaluation criteria (<i>i.e</i>., computation of errors). In this paper, some of the practical issues concerning the use of tracklets for tracking maneuvering targets are discussed, and the results from a simulation study of the impact of target maneuvers on tracking with tracklets are given. The study considered a fusion tracker receiving tracklets from multiple sensors at dispersed locations and targets maneuvering with either random accelerations or deterministic maneuvers. Tracklets from measurements and tracklets from tracks were studied. Since process noise was added to sensor and fusion trackers to account for target maneuvers, the tracklet methods studied are technically quasi-tracklets. A novel technique is used to compare the performance of tracklets for targets maneuvering randomly with that for targets performing deterministic maneuvers.