Message passing multitarget tracking with out-of-sequence measurements

This paper considers multitarget tracking under out-of-sequence measurements (OOSMs), i.e. when the measurements processed by the tracker might be out of order. In order to fully exploit information provided by the sensor, OOSMs should be re-utilized rather than being simply discarded so as to improve tracking performance. To this end, this paper proposes a message passing (MP) multitarget tracking algorithm under OOSMs, where MP is adopted to perform efficient association between target and (in-sequence and out-of-sequence) measurements. Simulation experiments show that, compared to simply discarding OOSMs, the accuracy in terms of target number and state estimates can be greatly enhanced by incorporating OOSMs, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach.