Data association — solution or avoidance: Evaluation of a filter based on RFS framework and factor graphs with SME

Data or measurement-to-track association is an integral and expensive part of any solution performing multi-target multi-sensor Cooperative Localization (CL) for better state estimation. Various performance evaluations have been performed between various state-of-the-art solutions, but they have been often limited within same family of algorithms. However, there exist solutions which avoid the task of data association to perform the CL in a multi-target multi-sensor environment. Factor Graphs using Symmetric Measurement Equations (SMEs) factor is one such solution. In this paper we compare and contrast the state estimation using state-of-the-art Random Finite Set (RFS) approach and using a Factor Graph solution with SMEs. For a RFS we use multi-sensor multi-object with the Generalized Labeled Multi-Bernoulli (GLMB) Filter. These two solution use conceptually different approaches, GLMB Filter solves the data association implicitly, but Factor Graph based solution avoids the task altogether. Simulations present an interesting results where for simple scenarios implemented GLMB filter performs efficiently. But the performance of GLMB Filter degrades faster than Factor Graphs using SMEs when the error in the sensors increase.