PLA-JPDA for Indoor Multi-Person Tracking Using IR-UWB Radars

Impulse-Radio Ultra-WideBand (IR-UWB) radar is of great interest due to its high range resolution. In indoor environments, IR-UWB radars are used for multi-person tracking. Besides, the Joint Probabilistic Data Association (JPDA) has been designed to associate tracks with persons. However, when multiple persons are wandering close to each other, multipath clutter and track coalescence pose challenges to the tracking task. This paper proposes the Path-Loss-based Adaptive JPDA (PLA-JPDA) for indoor multi-person tracking using IR-UWB radars. The PLA-JPDA suppresses multipath clutter according to the distance-dependent path-loss of radar signals. Moreover, the PLA-JPDA adjusts the validation gate based on measurements and modifies the weights related to association probability. Experiments are conducted in an indoor environment with three IR-UWB radars tracking two persons to validate the proposed approach. In the experiments, two persons wander towards each other along parallel lines. The average root-mean-square-error (RMSE) of tracking with the proposed PLA-JPDA is 0.14 meters. It is 18.7% and 13.7% of the average RMSEs of tracking with the JPDA and the Nearest Neighbor JPDA (NN-JPDA), respectively. The PLA-JPDA also outperforms the JPDA and the NN-JPDA in terms of Optimal Sub-Pattern Assignment (OSPA) distance. The source codes and experimental data of this paper are published at https://github.com/qhybupt/PLA-JPDA.