Multi-frame assignment PMHT that accounts for missed detections

Probabilistic multi-hypothesis tracking (PMHT) is an algorithm for tracking multiple targets when measurement-to- target assignments are unknown and must be jointly estimated with the target tracks. Multi-frame assignment PMHT (MF- PMHT) is an algorithm designed to mitigate some performance problems associated with PMHT. In MF-PMHT, the PMHT algorithm is applied to multi-frame sequences in the last L frames of data and considers the set of all possible measurement sequences. While effective in improving tracking performance compared to PMHT, performance of the original MF-PMHT degrades when the target single-frame detection probability is non-unity. This is because missed detections are not considered in the multi-frame sequences. A new MF-PMHT implementation is derived in this paper which explicitly considers missed detections in the multi-frame sequences. Performance of this MF-PMHT is compared to the original MF-PMHT algorithm as well as to a Homothetic PMHT. Simulation results indicate that the new MF- PMHT algorithm performs the same as the original algorithm when there are no missed detections and also performs better than the alternative algorithms considered when there are missed detections.