Chapter 4
Case Studies: Preliminary Discussions
This book contains four case studies that illustrate the application and performance of many of the tracking filters developed in Parts II and III. The first case study, developed in this chapter, illustrates the problem of tracking a ship through a field of directional frequency and ranging (DIFAR) sonobuoys. This is a particularly interesting problem because the noise on the bearing observations obtained from each individual buoy is Gaussian for input signals with high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and non-Gaussian for signal with low SNR. This case study will allow us to examine the utility of the tracking filters in the low SNR environment where the observation noise becomes non-Gaussian. We use this case study in Parts II and III to show how many of the tracking filters can be utilized for this DIFAR problem, presenting implementation details for each estimation method along with the track outputs plotted against truth tracks. We also assess relative track performance measures for all of the tracking algorithms.
In Part IV of this book the remaining case studies will be discussed, including tracking of a object moving in three dimensions using radar observation data; tracking of a falling bomb from video feed observations (photogrammetry); and the use of tracking filters in data fusion for photogrammetry tracking systems. The case studies range from the relatively benign problem in DIFAR bearings-only tracking to a really difficult ...
