Recent Advances in Multiple Target Tracking

This presentation will describe research and development activities involving Numerica's biggest technical focus area: multiple hypothesis tracking systems for military applications. Shawn will provide an overview of the multi-dimensional assignment problem that is solved by modern tracking systems, and will also present some recent contributions in the areas of (i) distributed tracking and (ii) data association ambiguity management. Distributed tracking involves the problem of multi-sensor multi-platform tracking, where the objective is to maintain a common track picture across all tracking nodes in a network. Data association ambiguity management involves the detection of association uncertainty, and the application of methods to mitigate the effect of this ambiguity on the track picture.
Dr. Shawn Herman is a program director at Numerica Corporation, an innovative small business located in Colorado, Ohio and California. Shawn and his technical group support the Missile Defense Agency's National Team through Numerica's development of the Multiple Hypothesis Correlator (MHC) and BMDS Launch Event Associator (BLEA) under the Command, Control, Battle Management, and Communications (C2BMC) program. Numerica's C2BMC algorithms play a critical role in the integration of individual missile defense systems, giving key decision makers the real-time information they need for global situational awareness. Shawn and his team also tackle a variety of interesting and challenging R&D problems in related areas, including sensor and communications resource management, battle management, bias estimation and information fusion. Before joining Numerica as a research scientist in 2002, Shawn designed algorithms and performed research at Lucent Technologies and Lockheed Martin Mission Systems. Shawn has published papers on speech recognition, joint tracking/classification via particle filters, bias estimation and mitigation, and ambiguity assessment of data association decisions.

Ph.D. "“ Electrical Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
M.S. "“ Electrical Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
B.S. "“ Electrical Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign