Characterizing objects and sensors

In most cases, not all properties characterizing observed objects in a certain application have the same importance for producing a situation picture or can be inferred by the sensor systems involved. At the very beginning, we have to identify suitable object properties relevant to the underlying requirements, which are called state quantities. In the context discussed here, state quantities are completely described by numbers or appropriate collections of numbers and may be time-dependent. All relevant properties characterizing an object of interest at a certain instant of time tk, k∈N, are gathered in a collection Xk of state quantities, which is called object state at time tk. Object states can also be composed of the individual object states of an object group.