Littoral Tracking using Particle Filter1Proc. Fifth International Conference on Information Fusion (Fusion 2002), Annapolis, MD, U.S.A.

Littoral tracking refers to the tracking of targets on land and in sea near the boundary of the two regions. A ground-moving target continues to move on land and can not enter the sea. Similarly, a sea-moving target moves in the sea and the land serves as an infeasible region. Enforcing infeasible regions or hard constraints in the framework of the Kalman filter or interacting multiple model (IMM) estimator is not natural. However, these hard constraints can be easily enforced using the particle filter algorithm. We formulate the littoral tracking problem as a joint tracking and classification problem, where we assign a target class for each isolated land or water region. We use a reflecting boundary condition to enforce the region constraint. We demonstrate this concept for a single target using the airborne ground moving target indicator measurements. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm produces robust classification probabilities using kinematic measurements.