Monitoring of reliability in Bayesian identification

Identification of tracked objects is a key capability of surveillance and information systems for air, surface (maritime), ground, and space environments. It improves situational awareness and offers decision support to operational users. Bayesian-style identification processes provide an identity as result. As input for taking further operational action, judgement of the remaining uncertainty is important. An operational user needs to know, how much he can rely upon the provided identification result. In this contribution, a typical Bayesian identification process is described and analyzed with respect to the support of an operational user in judging the reliability of an identification result. Measures proposed in literature do not completely fulfill the requirements of operational users. Existing approaches only deal with selected aspects of reliability. Therefore, relevant aspects of the overall reliability are considered in this paper. In addition, a set of appropriate measures is proposed, which corresponds to these aspects.