CANONICAL TRANSFORM FOR TRACKING WITH KINEMATIC MODELS

A canonical transform is presented that converts a coupled or uncouple d kinematic model for target tracking into a decoupled dimensionless c anonical form. The coupling is due to non-zero off-diagonal terms in t he covariance matrices of the process noise and/or the measurement noi se, which can be used to model the coupling of motion and/or measureme nt between coordinates. The decoupled dimensionless canonical form is obtained by simultaneously diagonalizing the noise covariance matrices , followed by a spatial-temporal normalization procedure. This canonic al form is independent of the physical specifications of an actual sys tem. Each subsystem corresponding to a canonical coordinate is charact erized by its process noise standard deviation, called the maneuver in dex as a generalization of the tracking index for target tracking, whi ch characterizes completely the performance of a steady-state Kalman f ilter. A number of applications of this canonical form are discussed. The usefulness of the canonical transform is illustrated via an exampl e of performance analysis of maneuvering target tracking in an air tra ffic control (ATC) system.