Removal of Out-of-Sequence Measurements from Tracks

In multisensor tracking systems that operate in a centralized or distributed information processing architecture, measurements from the same target obtained by different sensors can arrive at the processing center out of sequence due to system latencies. In order to avoid either a delay in the output or the need for reordering and reprocessing entire sequences of measurements, such latent measurements have to be processed by the tracking filter as out-of-sequence measurements (OOSM). Recent work developed a "one-step" procedure for incorporating OOSM with multiple-time-step latency into the tracking filter, which, while suboptimal, was shown to yield results very close to those obtained by reordering and reprocessing an entire sequence of measurements. The counterpart of this problem is the need to remove (revocate) measurements that have already been used to update a track state. This can happen in real-world systems when such measurements are reassigned to another track. Similarly to the problem of update with an OOSM, it is desired to carry out the removal of an earlier measurement without recomputing the track estimate (and the data association) using possibly a long sequence of subsequent measurements one at a time. A one-step algorithm is presented for this problem of removing a multistep OOSM.