We examine prototypical versions of the probabilistic data association (PDA) filter and the joint PDA filter developed in the Soviet Union in 1972. These filters, created by Y.S. Achkasov, are previously undiscussed in the conventional English-language multitarget tracking (MTT) literature, despite being translated into English from their original Russian soon after publication. We place this work in its appropriate historical context and demonstrate the equivalence of the proto-(J)PDA with the conventional forms of these algorithms, as well as discuss areas where this work anticipates multiple decades of MTT filter development.

The International Society of Information Fusion (ISIF) Stone Soup project seeks to bring together advances in target tracking through an open-source repository of software libraries. Additionally, the ISIF uncertainty reasoning working group provides an open-source ontology. This paper seeks to demonstrate the correspondence between the open source tracking repository and the Uncertainty Representation and Reasoning Evaluation Framework (URREF) ontology. For example, many target tracking challenge problems propose a scenario for data fusion techniques to solve, from which various performance metrics are considered for evaluation. The Stone Soup framework has the MetricGenerator class and the URREF has the accuracy class. The example presented in the paper utilizes the cubature Kalman filter to determine the impact of corrupted measurements on the track accuracy as an instance of the Stone Soup and URREF metrics.