Customer Reviews

Design and Analysis of Modern Tracking Systems (Artech House Radar Library)

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3 star:		(1)
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This book covers all the basic methods in tracking and data association as traditionally used in applications such as radar, robotics, image processing, signal analysis, ... The book provides a very solid introduction to the different topics of sensor analysis, characterisation of uncertainty, methods for single and multi target tracking, etc. The topic of sensory fusion is also well covered in terms of different approaches to integration (MAP; Evidential Reasoning, Bayes,...).

The book also covers more advanced topics of tracking systems such as situation assessment and sensor management. Here the authors have, unfortunately, decided to largely adopt a fuzzy logic approach and a POOR theoretical grounding of the work. These sections can be ignored.

Despite the poor sections on high level aspects the rest of the book is excellent and a solid reference for any one working on tracking systems. It might is a solid reference, but it is much too expensive (and to comprehensive) to be used for teaching.

This book proved to be a great disappointment. I am reasonably knowledgeable about sensors and tracking, but I needed to "take my game to the next level" for some work I was doing. I thought this book might be the vehicle to help me. It wasn't. It is at once overwhelming and underwhelming. It is basically a massive literature survey. Granted, that can be of value -- indeed, merely assembling such a massive tome is a truly prodigious feat. Still,it totally missed the mark as far as I am concerned. What I needed was an in-depth treatment of the fundamentals of multiple target tracking that would provide me with sufficient basic understanding to allow me to solve some difficult, but straightforward generic tracking problems.This book isn't it. Instead, the book was more like a huge cookbook that contained many recipes, but didn't help me learn to cook. The Table of Contents was actually a dead giveaway. It is 18 pages long, and many individual sections covering very complex topics are remarkably short -- 1-2 pages. That should have warned me that I wasn't going to find what I was looking for here. The book is also hard to read. Because it covers such a potpourri of topics, the notation is inconsistent, the acronyms are even more annoying than usual, and equations are plucked out of the references without sufficient context to make them "user friendly." As a result, using the book is exceptionally frustrating, and its sheer size makes the effort daunting. This is the probably the longest and certainly the most expensive technical book I have ever purchased. It wasn't worth it to me, and I would urge others to think twice.

A complete survey of modern tracking methods. Basic tracking fundamentals as well as advanced tracking concepts are explained with simple examples that are easy to follow and understand. In many instances I have gone to this book to understand things that were incomprehensible in journal articles. The book covers the basics of sensors, target dynamics, Kalman filtering, multiple hypothesis tracking, data fusion, reasoning schemes, sensor resource management, and more. My favorite chapter is the last: Detection and Tracking of Dim Targets in Clutter. If you are involved with tracking this book will be a valuable companion.

The best book about tracking. I recommend to reading to the experts in radar development