Target Tracking With Random Finite Sets PDF Download

Multitarget tracking is the process of jointly determining the number of tar- gets present and their states from noisy sets of measurements. The difficulty of the multitarget tracking problem is that the number of targets present can change as targets appear and disappear while the sets of measurements may contain false alarms and measurements of true targets may be missed. The theory of random finite sets was proposed as a systematic, Bayesian approach to solving the multitarget tracking problem. The conceptual solution is given by Bayes filtering fer the probability distribution of the set of target states, conditioned on the sets of measurements received, known as the multitar- get Bayes filter. A first-moment approximation to this filter, the probability hypothesis density (PHD) filter, provides a more computationally practical, but theoretically sound, solution. The central thesis of this work is that the random finite set frame- work is theoretically sound, compatible with the Bayesian methodology and amenable to immediate implementation in a wide range of contexts. In ad- vancing this thesis, new links between the PHD filter and existing Bayesian approaches for manoeuvre handling and incorporation of target amplitude information are presented. A new multi target metric which permits incor- poration of target confidence information is derived and new algorithms are developed which facilitate sequential Monte Carlo implementations of the PHD filter. Several applications of the PHD filter are presented, with a focus on applica.tions for tracking in sonar data. Good results are presented for im- plementations on real active and passive sonar data. The PHD filter is also deployed in order to extract bacterial trajectories from microscopic visual data in order to aid ongoing work in understanding bacterial chemotaxis. A performance comparison between the PHD filter and conventional mul- titarget tracking methods using simulated data is also presented, showing favourable results for the PHD filter.