Data association performance measures: Fidelity and selection

Target tracking in clutter is usually evaluated using simulations. The statistics of the overall tracking performance are gathered, including the false track discrimination, the root mean square trajectory tracking errors, or some combined measure of performance, e.g. OSPA. These performance measures treat the target tracking filter as a black box; i.e. the performance of separate target tracking algorithm components is neither considered nor evaluated. In this paper we partition the target tracking algorithm into the estimation and the data association components and consider the performance measures for the data association component. Three performance measures are proposed and evaluated: the fidelity measure, the selection measure and the competence measure which combines capabilities of the fidelity and the selection measures.