Measurement-to-Measurement Association for MDA with A Practical Coarse Gating Strategy

The problem of association of measurements acquired by passive bearings-only sensors in two dimensional (2D) plane is addressed in this paper. This problem can be formulated mathematically as a multidimensional assignment (MDA) problem with two steps of cost calculation and optimization. Compared with the optimization step, the cost calculation consumes more time (at least 80%; of the total time for solving the MDA problem). In order to reduce the computational requirements of the assignment costs of infeasible associations, a practical coarse gating strategy is proposed. First, two bearing measurements from different sensors are used to predict the bearing measurements of other sensors. Then, infeasible associations can be identified using gates centered on the predicted bearing measurements. This strategy is also extended to the measurement data association of heterogeneous sensors. Numerical examples verify the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.