Clutter

Target tracking in clutter is usually evaluated using simulations. The statistics of the overall tracking performance are gathered, including the false track discrimination, the root mean square trajectory tracking errors, or some combined measure of performance, e.g. OSPA. These performance measures treat the target tracking filter as a black box; i.e. the performance of separate target tracking algorithm components is neither considered nor evaluated. In this paper we partition the target tracking algorithm into the estimation and the data association components and consider the performance measures for the data association component. Three performance measures are proposed and evaluated: the fidelity measure, the selection measure and the competence measure which combines capabilities of the fidelity and the selection measures.

MacGuffin reached out for a contribution on my research on self-storage facilities for their issue dedicated to The Cabinet. The essays highlights some themes of my ongoing analysis of storage facilities, such as the emergence and the analysis of the phenomenon and its embodiment of a society of surplus, of clutter, of stuff obesity.
The storage unit is viewed here as an external cabinet and the summary questions answered are what do we store and, more significantly, why.


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In the periphery, arrays of self-storage facilities are part of the light industrial landscape of warehouses and ex-urban alienation. Within the urban fabric, storage buildings represent both container and camouflage architecture, and are perfect examples of what Professor Crawford calls " background buildings. " 1 Self-storage facilities are an architectural typology worthy of study, and not only for their growing impact on the city and suburban sprawl, or for the uncanny ability to mimic other design typolo-gies and adapt to the target market. They can be examined in terms of building type and construction methods. From the economic point of view, storage facilities are compelling: they are a by-product of shopping/goods architecture, consumerism and planned obsolescence. They embody currently popular issues of surplus and clutter/hoarding. The issue of " material excess " becomes an (ex) urban pathology , endemic to a culture of wholesale commerce and warehouse buying experiences. The clutter culture can be mapped and becomes tangible in the form of the " country of storage facilities " , a veritable document to " stuff obesity ". The current rise of self-storage facilities is also a physical reminder of the consequence of changes in social and living conditions. How do we, as architects and urban designers, confront the typology of the self-storage facility and the new urban/exurban enclaves that these commercial containers of space have created? How can we better understand the nature of the singularly camouflaged " housing of stuff " often found in the downtowns of second-tier U.S cities? The content of these buildings, the " user " if you wish, is constituted entirely of stuff we cannot or do not wish to fit in our homes. What is it that we store, and why?

Dans la détection CFAR, plusieurs méthodes adaptatives ont été adoptées afin de
déterminer le seuil qui permet de perfectionner les systèmes de détection.
Ce travail propose d’étudier et de traiter le problème de la détection CFAR dans un clutter de
mer représenté par une distribution Weibull. Pour cela nous avons choisi d’utiliser plusieurs
types de détecteurs, le CA, l’OS et le ML-CFAR, afin de déterminer la performance de chacun
d’entre eux dans différentes situations. Ces situations sont été présentées suivant la variation
du nombre de cellules, la variation de la Pfa et la variation du paramètre de forme C.
Dans le but de déterminer le meilleur des différents types de détecteurs, une comparaison a été
effectuée pour plusieurs paramètres par simulation suivant la méthode de Monte-Carlo.
Cette étude nous a permis en premier lieu de constater que le modèle de distribution Weibull
qui est le plus adapté pour la représentation du clutter de mer, est un modèle général par
rapport aux autres modèles car chaque changement effectué dans le paramètre de forme C
représente un autre modèle, par exemple: le modèle de Rayleigh, Gamma, K distribué etc.…
Aussi le paramètre de forme C peut présenter deux situations différentes suivant que C est
connu ou inconnu. Dans le second cas ce paramètre peut être estimer suivant plusieurs
méthodes. Pour le ML-CFAR, l'estimateur du Maximum de vraisemblance (Maximumlikelihood) a montré une amélioration de la performance par rapport à l'estimateur WeberHaykin. La caractéristique principale de l'estimateur du Maximum-likelihood, est qu’il utilise
toutes ces cellules pour cela l'algorithme présente une perte CFAR inférieure et la déviation
entre les valeurs réelles et les valeurs estimés est plus petite.
D’une façon générale, Malgré qu’il a été trouvé que le meilleur détecteur est le ML-CFAR,
tous les détecteurs présentent une meilleure performance pour une Pfa égale 10-5 et un
paramètre de forme C égale 2 représentant la distribution de Rayleigh.

– Performance evaluation of simultaneous tracking and identification (STID) systems consists of measures of performance, measures of effectiveness, and measures of force effectiveness. To investigate the capability of STID, we extend track purity to a current assignment ratio. Track purity determines the correctly associated measurements for a given scan where as the Current Assignment Ratio (CAR) determines the correct measurements for a given track. Using the CAR aids sensor management algorithms in determining which targets have robust features for target identification in clutter, such that the target can be tracked. The CAR enables effectiveness evaluation of STID systems for mission success. In the paper, we review the fusion performance evaluation literature, outline STID metrics, and demonstrate the use of the CAR in a scenario.

The prime role of head-up displays (HUDs) is to provide primary flight, navigation, aircraft and guidance information to the pilot in his forward field of view on see-through glasses with optical filter properties known as beam combiners (BC) which facilitates the pilot in excellent control of an aircraft activities through the concurrent scan of instrument data as well as the outside scene. Even though the HUDs are known to improve the flight performance, there are perceptual and cognitive issues associated with its use. This paper puts forward the results of an experimental study carried on human aspects in form of attention capture and tunneling due to HUD use under the environmental conditions where ambient brightness is changing and the HUD display screen presents a non-uniform brightness across the display screen. The pilots tend to have division of near and far domain attentional resources resulting due to the attention or cognitive capture as established in this study and also established in studies carried worldwide. HUDs may cause decrease in pilot’s situation awareness (SA) in tasks that require constant monitoring of information in the environment which may demand split second decisions at times. It has been established through the study carried out in this work that there is a distinct relation of HUD display brightness, contrast ratio (CR) and the non-uniformity in HUD display brightness with the attention capture and tunneling. The study conducted based on participant’s response to varying contrast ratios on HUD resulting due to the non-uniform brightness of HUD display under the simulated conditions shows that the non-uniformity in the HUD display brightness causes the tunneling effect as evident from the study results which clearly suggests that the viewer is forced to pay his attention more either on the HUD events which is the flight symbology, or the outside view. The pilot is not able to maintain the balance between the two events which are equally important. He or she is presented with differential brightness, variation of which can be significant to the extent that it distracts the pilot significantly such that his performance in observing HUD and the outside events simultaneously is affected.

The paper deals with the cancellation of direct signal, multipath and clutter echoes in passive radar, where the transmitted waveform is not under control of the radar designer and the sidelobes of the ambiguity function mask even targets largely displaced in range and Doppler from the disturbance. A sequential approach is presented for disturbance cancellation and target detection based on projections of the received signals in a subspace orthogonal to both disturbance and previously detected targets. Modeling the clutter spread on few Doppler bins allows complete clutter cancellation. The approach is shown to be effective against typical scenarios with a limited number of iterations.

In this paper, we address the problem of tracking an unknown and time varying number of targets and their states from noisy observations available at discrete intervals of time. Attention has recently focused on the role of simulation-based approaches, including Monte Carlo methods, in solving multitarget tracking problem, as these methods are able to perform well for nonlinear and non-Gaussian data models. In this paper, we present a comparative study of several Monte-Carlo methods in terms of estimation quality and complexity.

Automatic target detection methods for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images are sensitive to image resolution, size of the target to be detected, clutter complexity, and speckle noise level. A robust automatic target detection method needs to be less sensitive to the above factors. In this study, a constant false alarm rate (CFAR) based automatic target detection method which can find a target and its heterogeneous clutter independent of the image resolution and the target size has been developed. The proposed method provides efficient memory usage and low computational complexity.

Vegetation clutter is a limiting factor for bats that forage near ground level, and may determine the distribution of species and guilds. However, many studies that evaluated the effects of vegetation clutter on bats have used qualitative descriptions rather than direct measurements of vegetation density. Moreover, few studies have evaluated the effect of vegetation clutter on a regional scale. Here, we evaluate the influence of the physical obstruction of vegetation on phyllostomid-bat assemblages along a 520 km  transect in continuous Amazonian forest.We sampled bats using mist nets in eight localities during 80 nights (3840 net-hours) and estimated the ground-vegetation density with digital photographs. The total number of species, number of animalivorous species, total number of frugivorous species, number of understory frugivorous species, and abundance of canopy frugivorous bats were negatively associated with vegetation clutter. The bat assemblages showed a nested structure in relation to degree of clutter, with animalivorous and understory frugivorous bats distributed throughout the vegetation-clutter gradient, while canopy frugivores were restricted to sites with more open vegetation. The species distribution along the gradient of vegetation clutter was not closely associated with wing morphology, but aspect ratio and wing load differed between frugivores and animalivores. Vegetation structure plays an important role in structuring assemblages of the bats at the regional scale by increasing beta diversity between sites. Differences in foraging strategy and diet of the guilds seem to have contributed more to the spatial distribution of bats than the wing characteristics of the species alone.

A new paradigm for the efficient color-based tracking of objects seen from a moving camera is presented. The proposed technique employs the mean shift analysis to derive the target candidate that is the most similar to a given target model, while the prediction of the next target location is computed with a Kalman filter. The dissimilarity between the target model and the target candidates is expressed by a metric based on the Bhattacharyya coefficient. The implementation of the new method achieves real-time performance, being appropriate for a large variety of objects with different color patterns. The resulting tracking, tested on various sequences, is robust to partial occlusion, significant clutter, target scale variations, rotations in depth, and changes in camera position

Advanced airborne radar may require adaptive space-time processing (STP) to detect small targets at long ranges. STP is a multidimensional adaptive filter that resolves received radar data into a spectrum of plane waves in angular and Doppler Frequency coordinates. The platform of an airborne radar can scatter incident signals into the antenna, spreading the spectra of the clutter signals so that it overlaps the target signal and therefore increases the false alarm rate. To reduce the processing requirements of a full STP filter, a suboptimal architecture with fewer degrees of freedom is demonstrated and compared with the optimal architecture.

Does it Spark Joy? The question is asked by Japanese clutter-clearing
expert Marie Kondo in a Netflix program, where she helps North Americans deal with their many things and where she also teaches participants to
fold their clothes in organized ways. The question ‘Does it spark joy?’ in my text is used in an intellectual act of folding together thoughts from
situational aesthetics, vital materialism and a philosophy of mingled bodies - into a relational and processual ontology, which overcomes the subject-object divide, highlights the transcendence of self and promotes receptivity to the dynamic and open-ended character of the world. The mundanity
of clothing clutter is used to develop an approach of designing with care. The metaphor of the fold is part of the composition of the argument.

This essay attempts to come to grips with the idea of “tidiness.” “Tidiness” has become one of modern culture’s most durable fixations, an ideal whose influence is felt almost everywhere: from the austere admonitions of Marinetti in his famous Futurist manifestos, right through to the surprising popularity of self-help books like Marie Kondo’s recent best-seller “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying.” What is it about the ideals of tidiness that so galvanises our attention, that makes its aesthetic so alluring? In worshipping tidy, what is it we are after? What we soon discover is that “tidiness” isn’t some physical configuration or ideal, but a metaphysical one, and one – when its structure is laid bare – that can tell us much about what it means to live in the contemporary world.