Sensor fusion is a key system in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, ADAS. The perfor-mance of the sensor fusion depends on many factors such as the sensors used, the kinematicmodel used in the Extended Kalman Filter, EKF, the motion of the vehicles, the type ofroad, the density of vehicles, and the gating methods. The interactions between parametersand the extent to which individual parameters contribute to the overall accuracy of a sensorfusion system can be difficult to assess.In this study, a full-factorial experimental evaluation of a sensor fusion system basedon a real vehicle was performed. The experimental results for different driving scenariosand parameters are discussed and the factors that make the most impact are identified.The performance of sensor fusion depends on many factors such as the sensors used, thekinematic model used in the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) motion of the vehicles, type ofroad, density of vehicles, and gating methods.This study identified that the distance between the vehicles has the largest impact on theestimation error because the vision sensor performs poorly with increased distance. In addi-tion, it was identified that the kinematic models had no significant impact on the estimation.Last but not least, the ellipsoid gates performed better than rectangular gates.In addition, we propose a new gating algorithm called an angular gate. This algorithmis based on the observation that the data for each target lies in the direction of that target.Therefore, the angle and the range can be used for setting up a two-level gating approachthat is both more intuitive and computationally faster than ellipsoid gates. The angulargates can achieve a speedup factor of up to 2.27 compared to ellipsoid gates.Furthermore, we provide time complexity analysis of angular gates, ellipsoid gates, andrectangular gates demonstrating the theoretical reasons why angular gates perform better.Last, we evaluated the performance of the Munkres algorithm using a full factorial designand identified that narrower gates can speedup the running time of the Munkres algorithmand, surprisingly, even improve the RMSE in some cases.The low target maneuvering index of vehicular systems was identified as the reason whythe kinematic models do not have an impact on the estimation. This finding supports the useof simpler and computationally inexpensive filters instead of complex Interacting MultipleModel filters. The angular gates also improve the computational efficiency of the overallsensor fusion system making them suitable for vehicular application as well as for embeddedsystems and robotics
