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

Poisson multi-Bernoulli conjugate prior for multiple extended object filtering

This paper presents a Poisson multi-Bernoulli mixture (PMBM) conjugate prior for multiple extended object filtering. A Poisson point process is used to describe the existence of yet undetected targets, while a multi-Bernoulli mixture describes the distribution of the targets that have been detected. The prediction and update equations are presented for the standard transition density and measurement likelihood. Both the prediction and the update preserve the PMBM form of the density, and in this sense the PMBM density is a conjugate prior. However, the unknown data associations lead to an intractably large number of terms in the PMBM density, and approximations are necessary for tractability. A gamma Gaussian inverse Wishart implementation is presented, along with methods to handle the data association problem. A simulation study shows that the extended target PMBM filter performs well in comparison to the extended target d-GLMB and LMB filters. An experiment with Lidar data illustrates the benefit of tracking both detected and undetected targets

The Trajectory PHD Filter for Coexisting Point and Extended Target Tracking

This paper develops a general trajectory probability hypothesis density (TPHD) filter, which uses a general density for target-generated measurements and is able to estimate trajectories of coexisting point and extended targets. First, we provide a derivation of this general TPHD filter based on finding the best Poisson posterior approximation by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence, without using probability generating functionals. Second, we adopt an efficient implementation of this filter, where Gaussian densities correspond to point targets and Gamma Gaussian Inverse Wishart densities for extended targets. The L-scan approximation is also proposed as a simplified version to mitigate the huge computational cost. Simulation and experimental results show that the proposed filter is able to classify targets correctly and obtain accurate trajectory estimation

Implementation of the Gamma Gaussian Inverse Wishart Trajectory Probability Hypothesis Density Filter

This report contains equations used in the Gamma Gaussian Inverse Wishart Trajectory Probability Hypothesis Density (GGIWTPHD) filter

Bayesian multiple extended target tracking using labelled random finite sets and splines

In this paper, we propose a technique for the joint tracking and labelling of multiple extended targets. To achieve multiple extended target tracking using this technique, models for the target measurement rate, kinematic component and target extension are defined and jointly propagated in time under the generalised labelled multi-Bernoulli (GLMB) filter framework. In particular, we developed a Poisson mixture variational Bayesian (PMVB) model to simultaneously estimate the measurement rate of multiple extended targets and extended target extension was modelled using B-splines. We evaluated our proposed method with various performance metrics. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach

A Poisson Multi-Bernoulli Mixture Filter for Coexisting Point and Extended Targets

This paper proposes a Poisson multi-Bernoulli mixture (PMBM) filter for coexisting point and extended targets, i.e., for scenarios where there may be simultaneous point and extended targets. The PMBM filter provides a recursion to compute the multi-target filtering posterior based on probabilistic information on data associations, and single-target predictions and updates. In this paper, we first derive the PMBM filter update for a generalised measurement model, which can include measurements originated from point and extended targets. Second, we propose a single-target space that accommodates both point and extended targets and derive the filtering recursion that propagates Gaussian densities for single targets and gamma Gaussian inverse Wishart densities for extended targets. As a computationally efficient approximation of the PMBM filter, we also develop a Poisson multi-Bernoulli (PMB) filter for coexisting point and extended targets. The resulting filters are analysed via numerical simulations