Single target tracking in clutter: performance comparison between pda and vda

The dynamic programming algorithm, called the Viterbi algorithm PA), is an algorithm for finding the best path through the nodes of a trellis by minimizing the summed cost. It is widely used in estimation and detection problems in digital communications and signal processing. It hos been also used in the speech and character recognition where the speech signals or characters are modeled by hidden Markov models. Recently, the Viterbi algorithm has been employed in data association and forget tracking, namely; the Viterbi Data Association FDA) algorithm. The target motion is assumed to be a Markov process so that the cost increment over two consecutive time instances is only dependent on the states in these instances. In this paper, two dyerent PDA algorithms have been analyzed and compared to the standard Probabilistic Data Association (PDA) filter. Also, the perjomance of the algorithms is compared through simulations.