On point processes in multitarget tracking

Abstract

The finite-set statistics (FISST) approach to multitarget tracking was introduced in the mid-1990s. Its current extended form dates from 2001. In 2008, an "elementary" alternative to FISST was proposed, based on "finite point processes" rather than RFS's. This was accompanied by single-sensor and multisensor versions of a claimed generalization of the PHD filter, the "iFilter." Then in 2013 in the Journal of Advances in Information Fusion (JAIF) and elsewhere, the same author went on to claim that the FISST p.g.fl./functional derivative approach is actually "due to" (a "corollary" of) a 50-year-old pure-mathematics paper by Moyal; and described a "point process" p.g.fl./functional derivative approach to multitarget tracking supposedly based on it. In this paper it is shown that: (1)non-RFS point processes are a phenomenologically erroneous foundation for multitarget tracking; (2) nearly every equation, concept, discussion, derivation, and methodology in the JAIF paper originally appeared in FISST publications, without being so attributed; (3) FISST cannot possibly be "due to Moyal"; (4) the "point process" approach described in JAIF differs from FISST only in regard to terminology and notation, and thus in this sense appears to be an obscured, phenomenologically erroneous, and improperly attributed copy of FISST. It is also shown that the derivations of the single-sensor and multisensory iFilter appear to have had major errors, as did a subsequent recasting of the multisensor iFilter as a "traffic mapping filter."