A fusion and learning algorithm for landing aircraft tracking:compensating for exhaust plume disturbance

An algorithm is presented for tracking a landing aircraft using fusion of two different passive sensors, a laser range finder (LRF) and a forward-looking infrared (FLIR) camera. The main feature of this algorithm is its ability to identify and compensate for an exhaust plume disturbance. The algorithm is based on the extended Kalman filter (EKF) and the filtering confidence function (FCF) which introduces a learning approach to the tracking problem. The results of a simulation using the learning tracking algorithm and the EKF alone are presented and compared