Copyright © 2012 Jing Liu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The multiple maneuvering target tracking algorithm based on a particle filter is addressed. The equivalent-noise approach is adopted, which uses a simple dynamic model consisting of target state and equivalent noise which accounts for the combined effects of the process noise and maneuvers. The equivalent-noise approach converts the problem of maneuvering target tracking to that of state estimation in the presence of nonstationary process noise with unknown statistics. A novel method for identifying the nonstationary process noise is proposed in the particle filter framework. Furthermore, a particle filter based multiscan Joint Probability Data Association (JPDA) filter is proposed to deal with the data association problem in a multiple maneuvering target tracking. In the proposed multiscan JPDA algorithm, the distributions of interest are the marginal filtering distributions for each of the targets, and these distributions are approximated with particles. The multiscan JPDA algorithm examines the joint association events in a multiscan sliding window and calculates the marginal posterior probability based on the multiscan joint association events. The proposed algorithm is illustrated via an example involving the tracking of two highly maneuvering, at times closely spaced and crossed, targets, based on resolved measurements.