Derivation of the PHD filter based on direct Kullback-Leibler divergence minimisation

In this paper, we provide a novel derivation of the probability hypothesis density (PHD) filter without using probability generating functionals or functional derivatives. The PHD filter fits in the context of assumed density filtering and implicitly performs Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) minimisations after the prediction and update steps. The novelty of this paper is that the KLD minimisation is performed directly on the multitarget prediction and posterior densities

Trajectory probability hypothesis density filter

This paper presents the probability hypothesis density (PHD) filter for sets of trajectories: the trajectory probability density (TPHD) filter. The TPHD filter is capable of estimating trajectories in a principled way without requiring to evaluate all measurement-to-target association hypotheses. The TPHD filter is based on recursively obtaining the best Poisson approximation to the multitrajectory filtering density in the sense of minimising the Kullback-Leibler divergence. We also propose a Gaussian mixture implementation of the TPHD recursion. Finally, we include simulation results to show the performance of the proposed algorithm

On probabilistic inference approaches to stochastic optimal control

While stochastic optimal control, together with associate formulations like Reinforcement Learning, provides a formal approach to, amongst other, motor control, it remains computationally challenging for most practical problems. This thesis is concerned with the study of relations between stochastic optimal control and probabilistic inference. Such dualities { exempli ed by the classical Kalman Duality between the Linear-Quadratic-Gaussian control problem and the filtering problem in Linear-Gaussian dynamical systems { make it possible to exploit advances made within the separate fields. In this context, the emphasis in this work lies with utilisation of approximate inference methods for the control problem. Rather then concentrating on special cases which yield analytical inference problems, we propose a novel interpretation of stochastic optimal control in the general case in terms of minimisation of certain Kullback-Leibler divergences. Although these minimisations remain analytically intractable, we show that natural relaxations of the exact dual lead to new practical approaches. We introduce two particular general iterative methods ψ-Learning, which has global convergence guarantees and provides a unifying perspective on several previously proposed algorithms, and Posterior Policy Iteration, which allows direct application of inference methods. From these, practical algorithms for Reinforcement Learning, based on a Monte Carlo approximation to ψ-Learning, and model based stochastic optimal control, using a variational approximation of posterior policy iteration, are derived. In order to overcome the inherent limitations of parametric variational approximations, we furthermore introduce a new approach for none parametric approximate stochastic optimal control based on a reproducing kernel Hilbert space embedding of the control problem. Finally, we address the general problem of temporal optimisation, i.e., joint optimisation of controls and temporal aspects, e.g., duration, of the task. Specifically, we introduce a formulation of temporal optimisation based on a generalised form of the finite horizon problem. Importantly, we show that the generalised problem has a dual finite horizon problem of the standard form, thus bringing temporal optimisation within the reach of most commonly used algorithms. Throughout, problems from the area of motor control of robotic systems are used to evaluate the proposed methods and demonstrate their practical utility

Trajectory PHD and CPHD Filters

This paper presents the probability hypothesis density filter (PHD) and the cardinality PHD (CPHD) filter for sets of trajectories, which are referred to as the trajectory PHD (TPHD) and trajectory CPHD (TCPHD) filters. Contrary to the PHD/CPHD filters, the TPHD/TCPHD filters are able to produce trajectory estimates from first principles. The TPHD filter is derived by recursively obtaining the best Poisson multitrajectory density approximation to the posterior density over the alive trajectories by minimising the Kullback-Leibler divergence. The TCPHD is derived in the same way but propagating an independent identically distributed (IID) cluster multitrajectory density approximation. We also propose the Gaussian mixture implementations of the TPHD and TCPHD recursions, the Gaussian mixture TPHD (GMTPHD) and the Gaussian mixture TCPHD (GMTCPHD), and the L-scan computationally efficient implementations, which only update the density of the trajectory states of the last L time steps

Trajectory Poisson multi-Bernoulli filters

This paper presents two trajectory Poisson multi-Bernoulli (TPMB) filters for multi-target tracking: one to estimate the set of alive trajectories at each time step and another to estimate the set of all trajectories, which includes alive and dead trajectories, at each time step. The filters are based on propagating a Poisson multi-Bernoulli (PMB) density on the corresponding set of trajectories through the filtering recursion. After the update step, the posterior is a PMB mixture (PMBM) so, in order to obtain a PMB density, a Kullback-Leibler divergence minimisation on an augmented space is performed. The developed filters are computationally lighter alternatives to the trajectory PMBM filters, which provide the closed-form recursion for sets of trajectories with Poisson birth model, and are shown to outperform previous multi-target tracking algorithms