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

Poisson multi-Bernoulli mixture trackers: continuity through random finite sets of trajectories

The Poisson multi-Bernoulli mixture (PMBM) is an unlabelled multi-target distribution for which the prediction and update are closed. It has a Poisson birth process, and new Bernoulli components are generated on each new measurement as a part of the Bayesian measurement update. The PMBM filter is similar to the multiple hypothesis tracker (MHT), but seemingly does not provide explicit continuity between time steps. This paper considers a recently developed formulation of the multi-target tracking problem as a random finite set (RFS) of trajectories, and derives two trajectory RFS filters, called PMBM trackers. The PMBM trackers efficiently estimate the set of trajectories, and share hypothesis structure with the PMBM filter. By showing that the prediction and update in the PMBM filter can be viewed as an efficient method for calculating the time marginals of the RFS of trajectories, continuity in the same sense as MHT is established for the PMBM filter

Conjugate priors for Bayesian object tracking

Object tracking refers to the problem of using noisy sensor measurements to determine the location and characteristics of objects of interest in clutter. Nowadays, object tracking has found applications in numerous research venues as well as application areas, including air traffic control, maritime navigation, remote sensing, intelligent video surveillance, and more recently environmental perception, which is a key enabling technology in autonomous vehicles. This thesis studies conjugate priors for Bayesian object tracking with focus on multi-object tracking (MOT) based on sets of trajectories. Finite Set Statistics provides an elegant Bayesian formulation of MOT in terms of the theory of random finite sets (RFSs). Conjugate priors are also of great interest as they provide families of distributions that are suitable to work with when seeking accurate approximations to the true posterior distributions. Many RFS-based MOT approaches are only concerned with multi-object filtering without attempting to estimate object trajectories. An appealing approach to building tracks is by computing the multi-object densities on sets of trajectories. This leads to the development of trajectory filters, e.g., filters based on Poisson multi-Bernoulli mixture (PMBM) conjugate priors.In this thesis, [Paper A] and [Paper B] consider the problem of point object tracking where an object generates at most one measurement per scan. In [Paper A], it is shown that the trajectory MBM filter is the solution to the MOT problem for standard point object models with multi-Bernoulli birth. In addition, the multi-scan implementations of trajectory PMBM and MBM filters are presented. In [Paper B], a solution for recovering full trajectory information, via the calculation of the posterior of the set of trajectories from a sequence of multi-object filtering densities and the multi-object dynamic model, is presented. [Paper C] and [Paper D] consider the problem of ex- tended object tracking where an object may generate multiple measurements per scan. In [Paper C], the extended object PMBM filter for sets of objects is generalized to sets of trajectories. In [Paper D], a learning-based extended ob- ject tracking algorithm using a hierarchical truncated Gaussian measurement model tailored for automotive radar measurements is presented

Poisson Multi-Bernoulli Mixtures for Multiple Object Tracking

Multi-object tracking (MOT) refers to the process of estimating object trajectories of interest based on sequences of noisy sensor measurements obtained from multiple sources. Nowadays, MOT has found applications in numerous areas, including, e.g., air traffic control, maritime navigation, remote sensing, intelligent video surveillance, and more recently environmental perception, which is a key enabling technology in automated vehicles. This thesis studies Poisson multi-Bernoulli mixture (PMBM) conjugate priors for MOT. Finite Set Statistics provides an elegant Bayesian formulation of MOT based on random finite sets (RFSs), and a significant trend in RFSs-based MOT is the development of conjugate distributions in Bayesian probability theory, such as the PMBM distributions. Multi-object conjugate priors are of great interest as they provide families of distributions that are suitable to work with when seeking accurate approximations to the true posterior distributions. Many RFS-based MOT approaches are only concerned with multi-object filtering without attempting to estimate object trajectories. An appealing approach to building trajectories is by computing the multi-object densities on sets of trajectories. This leads to the development of many multi-object filters based on sets of trajectories, e.g., the trajectory PMBM filters. In this thesis, [Paper A] and [Paper B] consider the problem of point object tracking where an object generates at most one measurement per time scan. In [Paper A], a multi-scan implementation of trajectory PMBM filters via dual decomposition is presented. In [Paper B], a multi-trajectory particle smoother using backward simulation is presented for computing the multi-object posterior for sets of trajectories using a sequence of multi-object filtering densities and a multi-object dynamic model. [Paper C] and [Paper D] consider the problem of extended object tracking where an object may generate multiple measurements per time scan. In [Paper C], an extended object Poisson multi-Bernoulli (PMB) filter is presented, where the PMBM posterior density after the update step is approximated as a PMB. In [Paper D], a trajectory PMB filter for extended object tracking using belief propagation is presented, where the efficient PMB approximation is enabled by leveraging the PMBM conjugacy and the factor graph formulation

Poisson Multi-Bernoulli Mapping Using Gibbs Sampling

This paper addresses the mapping problem. Using a conjugate prior form, we derive the exact theoretical batch multi-object posterior density of the map given a set of measurements. The landmarks in the map are modeled as extended objects, and the measurements are described as a Poisson process, conditioned on the map. We use a Poisson process prior on the map and prove that the posterior distribution is a hybrid Poisson, multi-Bernoulli mixture distribution. We devise a Gibbs sampling algorithm to sample from the batch multi-object posterior. The proposed method can handle uncertainties in the data associations and the cardinality of the set of landmarks, and is parallelizable, making it suitable for large-scale problems. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on synthetic data and is shown to outperform a state-of-the-art method.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figure