Estimation and maintenance of measurement rates for multiple extended target tracking

In Gilholm et al.'s extended target model, the number of measurements generated by a target is Poisson distributed with measurement rate γ. Practical use of this extended target model in multiple extended target tracking algorithms requires a good estimate of γ. In this paper, we first give a Bayesian recursion for estimating γ using the well-known conjugate prior Gamma-distribution. In multiple extended target tracking, consideration of different measurement set associations to a single target makes Gamma-mixtures arise naturally. This causes a need for mixture reduction, and we consider the reduction of Gamma-mixtures by means of merging. Analytical minimization of the Kullback-Leibler divergence is used to compute the single Gamma distribution that best approximates a weighted sum of Gamma distributions. Results from simulations show the merits of the presented multiple target measurement-rate estimator. The Bayesian recursion and presented reduction algorithm have important implications for multiple extended target tracking, e.g. using the implementations of the extended target PHD filter.