1. A computer readable storage medium having a method encoded thereon, the method represented by computer readable programming code, executed by a computer to perform the method comprising the steps of: classifying input sensor data by comparing one or more measured target attributes with one or more known attributes of a finite set of uniquely identified targets; generating an initial set of one or more candidate targets based upon a comparison of the classified input sensor data with the known attributes of the finite set of uniquely identified targets; calculating a minimum required speed for each candidate target to travel between a geolocation history location and a location provided by the input sensor data, the minimum required speed subject to both obstacle avoidance and status transition time constraints; assigning a statistical weight to each candidate target based upon its calculated minimum required speed; calculating a data association probability of each candidate target with the classified input sensor data; and generating a final set of candidate targets by selecting the candidate targets from the initial set of candidate targets having calculated data association probabilities that exceed a predetermined threshold value.
8. The computer readable storage medium of claim 1 , wherein the step of generating a final set of candidate targets includes selecting one or more candidate targets from the set of initial candidate targets wherein the data association probability for each selected candidate target exceeds a threshold value calculated from statistical cluster analysis of the calculated data association probabilities for all of the initial candidate targets.