A tracking gate algorithm based on optimal performance of data association

Gating is a very important technique of data association. Creating an excellent gate algorithm, which could efficiently decrease the number of extraneous returns falling within the gate, can improve the data association accuracy and decrease the computation complexity. Hence, a novel tracking gate algorithm is presented. The main feature of our method is to estimate the size of gate by calculating the optimal solution of an appraising function of the performance of the data association algorithm. A comparison of our method to classical methods demonstrates that our algorithm is superior to these methods, especially in a heavy clutter and false alarm environment.