A Gaussian inverse Wishart PHD Filter using Stochastic Partitioning for Multiple Extended Object Tracking

This thesis deals with the object tracking problem of multiple extended objects. For instance, this tracking problem occurs when a car with sensors drives on the road and detects multiple other cars in front of it. When the setup between the senor and the other cars is in a such way that multiple measurements are created by each single car, the cars are called extended objects. This can occur in real world scenarios, mainly with the use of high resolution sensors in near field applications. Such a near field scenario leads a single object to occupy several resolution cells of the sensor so that multiple measurements are generated per scan. The measurements are additionally superimposed by the sensor’s noise. Beside the object generated measurements, there occur false alarms, which are not caused by any object and sometimes in a sensor scan, single objects could be missed so that they not generate any measurements. To handle these scenarios, object tracking filters are needed to process the sensor measurements in order to obtain a stable and accurate estimate of the objects in each sensor scan. In this thesis, the scope is to implement such a tracking filter that handles the extended objects, i.e. the filter estimates their positions and extents. In context of this, the topic of measurement partitioning occurs, which is a pre-processing of the measurement data. With the use of partitioning, the measurements that are likely generated by one object are put into one cluster, also called cell. Then, the obtained cells are processed by the tracking filter for the estimation process. The partitioning of measurement data is a crucial part for the performance of tracking filter because insufficient partitioning leads to bad tracking performance, i.e. inaccurate object estimates. In this thesis, a Gaussian inverse Wishart Probability Hypothesis Density (GIW-PHD) filter was implemented to handle the multiple extended object tracking problem. Within this filter framework, the number of objects are modelled as Random Finite Sets (RFSs) and the objects’ extent as random matrices (RM). The partitioning methods that are used to cluster the measurement data are existing ones as well as a new approach that is based on likelihood sampling methods. The applied classical heuristic methods are Distance Partitioning (DP) and Sub-Partitioning (SP), whereas the proposed likelihood-based approach is called Stochastic Partitioning (StP). The latter was developed in this thesis based on the Stochastic Optimisation approach by Granström et al. An implementation, including the StP method and its integration into the filter framework, is provided within this thesis. The implementations, using the different partitioning methods, were tested on simulated random multi-object scenarios and in a fixed parallel tracking scenario using Monte Carlo methods. Further, a runtime analysis was done to provide an insight into the computational effort using the different partitioning methods. It emphasized, that the StP method outperforms the classical partitioning methods in scenarios, where the objects move spatially close. The filter using StP performs more stable and with more accurate estimates. However, this advantage is associated with a higher computational effort compared to the classical heuristic partitioning methods

Extended Object Tracking: Introduction, Overview and Applications

This article provides an elaborate overview of current research in extended object tracking. We provide a clear definition of the extended object tracking problem and discuss its delimitation to other types of object tracking. Next, different aspects of extended object modelling are extensively discussed. Subsequently, we give a tutorial introduction to two basic and well used extended object tracking approaches - the random matrix approach and the Kalman filter-based approach for star-convex shapes. The next part treats the tracking of multiple extended objects and elaborates how the large number of feasible association hypotheses can be tackled using both Random Finite Set (RFS) and Non-RFS multi-object trackers. The article concludes with a summary of current applications, where four example applications involving camera, X-band radar, light detection and ranging (lidar), red-green-blue-depth (RGB-D) sensors are highlighted.Comment: 30 pages, 19 figure

The Coordinate Particle Filter - A novel Particle Filter for High Dimensional Systems

Parametric filters, such as the Extended Kalman Filter and the Unscented Kalman Filter, typically scale well with the dimensionality of the problem, but they are known to fail if the posterior state distribution cannot be closely approximated by a density of the assumed parametric form. For nonparametric filters, such as the Particle Filter, the converse holds. Such methods are able to approximate any posterior, but the computational requirements scale exponentially with the number of dimensions of the state space. In this paper, we present the Coordinate Particle Filter which alleviates this problem. We propose to compute the particle weights recursively, dimension by dimension. This allows us to explore one dimension at a time, and resample after each dimension if necessary. Experimental results on simulated as well as real data confirm that the proposed method has a substantial performance advantage over the Particle Filter in high-dimensional systems where not all dimensions are highly correlated. We demonstrate the benefits of the proposed method for the problem of multi-object and robotic manipulator tracking