Joint Tracking and Classification of Airbourne Objects using Particle Filters and the Continuous Transferable Belief Model

This paper describes the integration of a particle filter and a continuous version of the transferable belief model. The output from the particle filter is used as input to the transferable belief model. The transferable belief model's continuous nature allows for the prior knowledge over the classification space to be incorporated within the system. Classification of objects is demonstrated within the paper and compared to the more classical Bayesian classification routine. This is the first time that such an approach has been taken to jointly classify and track targets. We show that there is a great deal of flexibility built into the continuous transferable belief model and in our comparison with a Bayesian classifier, we show that our novel approach offers a more robust classification output that is less influenced by noise