Vehicle Tracking Based on Fusion of Magnetometer and Accelerometer Sensor Measurements With Particle Filtering

In this paper, we propose a method for vehicle tracking on roadways using measurements of magnetometers and accelerometers. The measurements are used to build a low-cost, low-complexity vehicle tracking sensor platform for highway traffic monitoring. First, the problem is formulated by introducing the process model for the motion of the vehicle on the road and two measurement models: one for each of the sensors. Second, it is shown how the measurements of the sensors can be fused using particle filtering. The standard sampling importance resampling (SIR) particle filter is extended for processing of multirate sensor measurements and models that employ unknown static parameters. The latter are treated by Rao–Blackwellization. The performance of the method is demonstrated by computer simulations. It is found that it is feasible to fuse the two sensors for vehicle tracking and that the proposed multirate particle filter performs better than particle filters that process only measurements of one of the sensors. The main contribution of this paper is the novel approach of fusing the measurements of road-mounted magnetometers and accelerometers for vehicle tracking and traffic monitoring.