Course on “Multiple‐Hypothesis Tracking (MHT), Distributed MHT, and Graph‐Based Extensions”

Content

Multiple Hypothesis Tracking (MHT) is a leading paradigm for Multi‐Target Tracking (MTT). In this lecture, we first describe the target and sensor mathematical modeling assumptions that enable track‐oriented MHT. Next, we derive the MHT recursion and illustrate its use with illustrative examples. We provide broader context by describing connections between MHT and the overall taxonomy of MTT methodologies. We discuss recent advances in cutting‐edge MHT processing and their relevance to operational surveillance applications. Despite the proven success of MHT as a methodology for MTT, computational constraints and other fundamental performance limitations may lead to unacceptable performance in some settings. We discuss the benefits that can be achieved with multi‐stage MHT processing. In many settings, judicious distributed MHT processing enables improved performance over (necessarily suboptimal) centralized MHT. We provide illustrative examples from several domains. Additionally, we describe recent advances in graph‐based tracking, a fast (approximate) approach to MHT that provides improved results in certain applications.

Curriculum Vitae

Stefano Coraluppi is a Chief Scientist at Systems & Technology Research (STR). He received the BS degree in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1990, and MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland in 1992 and 1997. He has held research staff positions at ALPHATECH Inc. (1997-2002), the NATO Undersea Research Centre (2002-2010), Compunetix Inc. (2010-2014), and STR (since 2014). His research interests include multi-target tracking, multi-sensor data fusion, distributed detection and estimation, nonlinear filtering, and stochastic control. Dr. Coraluppi serves on the IEEE AESS Board of Governors and the ISIF Board of Directors. He is Editor-in-Chief for the ISIF Journal of Advances in Information Fusion, and previously served as Associate Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems. He is a Fellow of IEEE and an IEEE AESS Distinguished Lecturer. He lecturers regularly for the NATO Science and Technology Organization. Dr. Coraluppi served as General Co-Chair (with Peter Willett) for the ISIF/IEEE 9th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION) in Florence, Italy in 2006. He is General Co-Chair (with Lauro Snidaro) for the 27th FUSION conference, to be held in July 2024 in Venice, Italy.