Adaptive Collaborative Gaussian Mixture Probability Hypothesis Density Filter for Multi-Target Tracking

Tracking Ground Targets with a Road Constraint Using a GMPHD Filter

The Gaussian mixture probability hypothesis density (GMPHD) filter is applied to the problem of tracking ground moving targets in clutter due to its excellent multitarget tracking performance, such as avoiding measurement-to-track association, and its easy implementation. For the existing GMPHD-based ground target tracking algorithm (the GMPHD filter incorporating map information using a coordinate transforming method, CT-GMPHD), the predicted probability density of its target state is given in road coordinates, while its target state update needs to be performed in Cartesian ground coordinates. Although the algorithm can improve the filtering performance to a certain extent, the coordinate transformation process increases the complexity of the algorithm and reduces its computational efficiency. To address this issue, this paper proposes two non-coordinate transformation roadmap fusion algorithms: directional process noise fusion (DNP-GMPHD) and state constraint fusion (SC-GMPHD). The simulation results show that, compared with the existing algorithms, the two proposed roadmap fusion algorithms are more accurate and efficient for target estimation performance on straight and curved roads in a cluttered environment. The proposed methods are additionally applied using a cardinalized PHD (CPHD) filter and a labeled multi-Bernoulli (LMB) filter. It is found that the PHD filter performs less well than the CPHD and LMB filters, but that it is also computationally cheaper.

A Student's t Mixture Probability Hypothesis Density Filter for Multi-Target Tracking with Outliers

In multi-target tracking, the outliers-corrupted process and measurement noises can reduce the performance of the probability hypothesis density (PHD) filter severely. To solve the problem, this paper proposed a novel PHD filter, called Student’s t mixture PHD (STM-PHD) filter. The proposed filter models the heavy-tailed process noise and measurement noise as a Student’s t distribution as well as approximates the multi-target intensity as a mixture of Student’s t components to be propagated in time. Then, a closed PHD recursion is obtained based on Student’s t approximation. Our approach can make full use of the heavy-tailed characteristic of a Student’s t distribution to handle the situations with heavy-tailed process and the measurement noises. The simulation results verify that the proposed filter can overcome the negative effect generated by outliers and maintain a good tracking accuracy in the simultaneous presence of process and measurement outliers.

Tracking the Turn Maneuvering Target Using the Multi-Target Bayes Filter with an Adaptive Estimation of Turn Rate

Tracking the target that maneuvers at a variable turn rate is a challenging problem. The traditional solution for this problem is the use of the switching multiple models technique, which includes several dynamic models with different turn rates for matching the motion mode of the target at each point in time. However, the actual motion mode of a target at any time may be different from all of the dynamic models, because these models are usually limited. To address this problem, we establish a formula for estimating the turn rate of a maneuvering target. By applying the estimation method of the turn rate to the multi-target Bayes (MB) filter, we develop a MB filter with an adaptive estimation of the turn rate, in order to track multiple maneuvering targets. Simulation results indicate that the MB filter with an adaptive estimation of the turn rate, is better than the existing filter at tracking the target that maneuvers at a variable turn rate.