A new relaxation algorithm and passive sensor data association

The static problem of associating measurements at a given time from three angle-only sensors in the presence of clutter, missed detections, and an unknown number of targets is addressed. The measurement-target association problem is formulated as one of maximizing the joint likelihood function of the measurement partition. Mathematically, this formulation leads to a generalization of the 3-D assignment (matching) problem, which is known to be NP hard. The solution to the optimization problem developed is a Lagrangian relaxation technique that successively solves a series of generalized two-dimensional (2-D) assignment problems. The algorithm is illustrated by several application examples.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>