<title>Track testing for single targets in clutter</title>

Abstract

This paper concerns itself with the target-free behavior of data association in clutter. There are a pair of main results.In the first, a new technique is developed for the detection of track loss. The basis is Page's (cusum) test, but a modification is given for the situation that the track-absent parameter (e.g. of mean of squared innovations) is not known. The result is a Page-style test with variable bias and threshold. The second matter of interest is the targetfree distribution of the maximum-likelihood probabilistic data association (MLPDA) statistic. It is confirmed via importance sampling that a Gaussian distribution is not inappropriate; but the mean and variance of this distribution are different from those of the un-maximized log-likelihood surface. Guidance is given on the calculation of these.