Cubature Information Gaussian Mixture Probability Hypothesis Density Approach for Multi Extended Target Tracking

In multi-extended target tracking, each target may generate more than one observation. The traditional probability hypothesis density (PHD)-based methods are no longer effective in such scenarios. Recently, the Gaussian mixture PHD approach for the extended target tracking (ET-GM-PHD) has been presented to solve such a problem. The tracking performance of this approach has been restricted by the following disadvantages. First, it only focuses on the linear models. When targets are moving with nonlinear models, it may lead to great tracking errors. Second, the birth intensities are commonly assumed as a prior. In practice, these intensities are always unknown. In order to improve the tracking performance of the traditional ET-GM-PHD approach, a novel extended target tracking approach, namely the ET-cubature information GM-PHD (ET-CIGM-PHD) approach, has been proposed in this paper. To be more specific, we, first, utilize the cubature information filter (CIF) and gating methods to predict and update the Gaussian mixture components of the ET-GM-PHD approach. In the merit of high estimating accuracy of the CIF method, the tracking accuracy of the traditional ET-GM-PHD approach can be significantly improved. Due to the gating method, only part of cells can be used to construct the observation set in the update stage. Thus, the computational load of our approach can be significantly reduced. Then, we propose an adaptive initiating method for the birth intensity initiating. In our method, we utilize the estimated target set to select the most possible partition. Then, we remove cells associated with the estimated targets from the selected partition. The left cells are used to initiate the birth intensity. With the help of the above implementations, the birth intensity can be adaptively initiated. Using such a method, our approach can solve the cases that the prior information of birth intensity is rather little. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.