Complexity reduction in MHT/MFA tracking, part II: hierarchical implementation and simulation results

The MHT/MFA approach to tracking has been shown to have significant advantages compared to single frame methods. This is especially the case for dense scenarios where there are many targets and/or significant clutter. However, the data association problem for such scenarios can become computationally prohibitive. To make the problem manageable, one needs effective complexity reduction methods to reduce the number of possible associations that the data association algorithm must consider. At the 2005 SPIE conference, Part I of this paper(1) was presented wherein a number of "gating algorithms" used for complexity reduction were derived. These included bin gates, coarse pair and triple gates, and multiframe gates. In this Part II paper, we provide new results that include additional gating methods, describe a hierarchical framework for the integration of gates, and show simulation results that demonstrate a. greater than 95% effectiveness at removing clutter from the tracking problem.