On Spawning and Combination of Extended/Group Targets Modeled With Random Matrices

In extended/group target tracking, where the extensions of the targets are estimated, target spawning and combination events might have significant implications on the extensions. This paper investigates target spawning and combination events for the case that the target extensions are modeled in a random matrix framework. The paper proposes functions that should be provided by the tracking filter in such a scenario. The results, which are obtained by a gamma Gaussian inverse Wishart implementation of an extended target probability hypothesis density filter, confirms that the proposed functions improve the performance of the tracking filter for spawning and combination events.