Kirubarajan, Thia (McMaster University)

Purpose

The objective of state estimation is to mitigate the effects of noise in sensor measurements and extract the fixed or time-varying parameters of an object of interest using certain system and measurement models. Noise mitigation is necessary not only because no sensor is perfect, but also because our knowledge or model assumptions about any unknown system and its parameters are imprecise. The estimator considers the model uncertainties and noise statistics in order to optimally estimate the parameters of the subject of interest to some optimality criterion. While state estimation typically considers only the effects of system (or model) noise and measurement noise, in estimating the state of a moving object over time, target tracking considers additional measurement-origin uncertainties due to missing detections, false alarms, and interference from other objects of interest. In target tracking, the objective of state estimation is then to mitigate the effects of model and sensor noise and those of measurement-origin uncertainties.