Track association in the presence of multi-mode propagation

A radar network produces many tracks some of which correspond to the same target. In the case of over the horizon radar, multi-mode propagation is a significant source of additional observations. Determining which tracks are associated with the same target is at the core of data fusion. The authors discuss the correlation and association phase. Association is arguably the crux of data fusion. Later they outline how the current work will be extended to perform mode estimation and alignment. They assume that the association of individual detections to constitute tracks has already been done correctly by a tracker and so are concerned with track association. A model based algorithm for associating multi-mode tracks is proposed and analyzed for numerical complexity. The number of computations is O(T² ) where T is the number of tracks, but this can be improved by gating techniques. The proposed algorithm can be extended to perform mode estimation and coordinate alignment