Modeling and Information Processing

TRACK - Tracking

Objective

• To design robust tracking methods for tracking uncooperative objects in a complex environment.

Contribution

Tracking the paths of ground targets is a crucial element in the battlefield surveillance. It is used to anticipate the different strategies to be developed (positioning of sensors, management of geographic data resources, etc.) and contributes to greater global coherence of the intelligence function. Path tracking is possible only if there are one or more homogeneous and/or heterogeneous sources of information. Using airborne GMTI (Ground Moving Target Indicator) observations you can detect the moving targets by measuring the Doppler effect. The tracking function is based on these GMTI measurements and the modeling of the different possible dynamics of targets. It can trace the target's temporal changes of position (or track) in real time. However, the usual tracking techniques, widely used in the context of aerial targets, cannot be applied directly. In practice, contrary to the aerial environment, the land environment has areas of invisibility caused by the elevation of the terrain. Furthermore, road traffic is much denser, generating a large amount of data exceeding an operator's analysis capabilities. Finally, ground targets are extremely maneuverable and all the possible dynamics must be considered in order no to lose the tracks.

The DTIM's fusion section is working, amongst other things, on introducing contextual data (position of road segments, elevation of the terrain, etc.) into the tracking process. The results obtained with simulated and real data show a significant improvement over the traditional tracking techniques.

Illustration

• GMTI tracking and taking contextual data into account
• Tracking mobile objects in a sequence of images

Last Update: 11 October 2006 - © ONERA 2009 - Terms of use