Interrupted and multi-source track segment association (TSA) are two key challenges in target trajectory research within radar data processing. Traditional methods often rely on simplistic assumptions about target motion and statistical techniques for track association, leading to problems such as unrealistic assumptions, susceptibility to noise, and suboptimal performance limits. This study proposes a unified framework to address the challenges of associating interrupted and multi-source track segments by measuring trajectory similarity. We present TSA-cTFER, a novel network utilizing contrastive learning and TransFormer Encoder to accurately assess trajectory similarity through learned Representations by computing distances between high-dimensional feature vectors. Additionally, we tackle dynamic association scenarios with a two-stage online algorithm designed to manage tracks that appear or disappear at any time. This algorithm categorizes track pairs into easy and hard groups, employing tailored association strategies to achieve precise and robust associations in dynamic environments. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed TSA-cTFER network with the two-stage online algorithm outperforms existing methods, achieving 94.59% accuracy in interrupted track segment association tasks and 94.83% in multi-source track segment association tasks.
1 January 2025 in IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement
Accurateestimation of clutter measurement density (CMD) is crucial for radar-based multi-target tracking (MTT), especially under spatially non-uniform and temporally varying environments. Existing methods, including finite mixture models, kernel density estimation, and normalizing flows, often require scene-specific tuning and exhibit limited generalization. To address these limitations, we propose HyperNCMD, a scene-adaptive CMD estimator that employs hypernetworks to dynamically generate the parameters of normalizing flows. To capture spatial variability, radar measurements are first embedded using Random Fourier Features (RFFs), and then processed by a spatio-temporal encoder that jointly models spatial structures and temporal clutter dynamics. The hypernetwork leverages the encoded embedding to adaptively produce flow parameters, enabling flexible CMD estimation across diverse environments. Lightweight data augmentation is further applied to make the estimator more robust across diverse environments, while a Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM)-based fine-tuning scheme enhances test-time adaptation. Experiments on both synthetic and real radar datasets demonstrate that HyperNCMD achieves superior accuracy and robustness, achieving up to 10.5% reduction in per-point negative log-likelihood under dynamically varying conditions. These results highlight the potential of hypernetwork-driven CMD modeling for reliable radar perception in complex sensing environments.