Approximate Chernoff fusion of Gaussian mixtures for ballistic target tracking in the re-entry phase

A track-to-track fusion method to combine local estimates modeled with Gaussian mixture model is proposed for tracking a re-entry ballistic vehicle. An arbitrary power of a Gaussian mixture distribution is approximated with Gaussian mixture model using first order expansion approximation, which leads to an analytical fusion equation for approximate Chernoff fusion. In the end, we verify the effectiveness of the proposed fusion algorithm with a series of Monte Carlo simulations.