A new track initiation method for multi-target tracking

This paper introduces a novel track initiation technique for the bearings-only two-sensor-multi-target tracking system. Observing that each target is of the characteristic of uniform rectilinear motion, a new objective functional derived from the thought of Hough transform is investigated. On the basis of it, the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm, a kind of heuristic optimization method, is utilized to initiate tracks of interest. Numerical simulation results are presented and show that the proposed ACO-based track initiation method performs well compared with other traditional ones such as rule-based, logic-based, and Hough-transform-based track initiation approaches.