A Cartesian B-Spline Vehicle Model for Extended Object Tracking

In this paper a novel representation of the contour of an spatially extended object is proposed, which is tailored to vehicles with an unknown size and orientation that are tracked based on measurements from an automotive Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR). We deploy quadratic uniform periodic B-Splines to directly represent a star-convex shape approximation of the object in Cartesian space. In contrast to previous approaches that work in polar space, we introduce a new walk parameter to model the contour function of an object such that the shapes parameters are well defined and lie within the same space as the measurements. A major advantage of the approach is that a scaling of the length and the width can be performed independently by scaling the basis points of the Splines.