Estimating Activity at Multiple Scales using Spatial Abstractions

Autonomous robots operating in dynamic environments must maintain beliefs over a hypothesis space that is rich enough to represent the activities of interest at different scales. This is important both in order to accommodate the availability of evidence at varying degrees of coarseness, such as when interpreting and assimilating natural instructions, but also in order to make subsequent reactive planning more efficient. We present an algorithm that combines a topology-based trajectory clustering procedure that generates hierarchically-structured spatial abstractions with a bank of particle filters at each of these abstraction levels so as to produce probability estimates over an agent's navigation activity that is kept consistent across the hierarchy. We study the performance of the proposed method using a synthetic trajectory dataset in 2D, as well as a dataset taken from AIS-based tracking of ships in an extended harbour area. We show that, in comparison to a baseline which is a particle filter that estimates activity without exploiting such structure, our method achieves a better normalised error in predicting the trajectory as well as better time to convergence to a true class when compared against ground truth.Comment: 16 page

1 Accelerating Particle Filter using Randomized Multiscale and Fast Multipole Type Methods

Abstract—Particle filter is a powerful method that tracks the state of a target based on non-linear observations. We present a multiscale based method that accelerates the computation of particle filters. Unlike the conventional way, which calculates weights over all particles in each cycle of the algorithm, we sample a small subset from the source particles using matrix decomposition methods. Then, we apply a function extension algorithm that uses a particle subset to recover the density function for all the rest of the particles not included in the chosen subset. The computational effort is substantial especially when multiple objects are tracked concurrently. The proposed algorithm reduces significantly the computational load. By using the Fast Gaussian Transform, the complexity of the particle selection step is reduced to a linear time in n and k, where n is the number of particles and k is the number of particles in the selected subset. We demonstrate our method on both simulated and on real data such as objects tracking in videos sequences. Index Terms—particle filter, multiscale methods, nonlinear tracking