High-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) can detect and continuously track ship objects in real time and beyond the horizon. When ships navigate in a sea area, their motions in a time period form a scenario. The diversity and complexity of the motion scenarios make it difficult to accurately track ships, in which failures such as track fragmentation (TF) are frequently observed. However, it is still unclear how and to what degrees the motions of ships affect the tracking performance, especially which motion patterns can cause tracking failures. This paper addresses this problem and attempts to undertake a first step towards providing an intensive quantitative performance assessment and vulnerability detection scheme for ship-tracking algorithms by proposing an evolutionary and data-mining-based approach. Low-dimensional scenarios in terms of multiple maneuvering ship objects are generated using a grammar-based model. Closed-loop feedback is introduced using evolutionary computation to efficiently collect scenarios that cause more and more tracking performance loss, which provides diversified cases for analysing using data-mining technique to discover indicators of tracking vulnerability. Results on different tracking algorithms show that more cluster and convergence patterns and longer duration of our convoy and cluster patterns in the scenarios can cause severer TF to HFSWR ship tracking.
Keywords: HFSWR; evolutionary computation; motion pattern metrics; multiple object tracking; performance evaluation; target motion analysis.