Track Fusion with Road Constraints

This paper is concerned with tracking of ground targets on roads and investigates possible ways to improve target state estimation via fusing a target’s track with information about a road along which the target is believed to be traveling. A target track is estimated by a surveillance radar whereas a digital map provides the road network of a region under surveillance. When the information about roads is as accurate as (or even better than) radar measurements, it is desired naturally to incorporate such information (fusion) into target state estimation. In this paper, roads are modeled with analytic functions and its fusion with a target track is cast as linear or nonlinear state constraints in an optimization procedure. The constrained optimization is then solved with the Lagrangian multiplier, leading to a closed-form solution for linear constraints and an iterative solution for nonlinear constraints. Geometric interpretations of the solutions are provided for simple cases. Computer simulation results are presented to illustrate the algorithms.