Joint Conditional Random Field Filter for Multi-Object Tracking

Object tracking can improve the performance of mobile robot especially in populated dynamic environments. A novel joint conditional random field Filter (JCRFF) based on conditional random field with hierarchical structure is proposed for multi‐object tracking by abstracting the data associations between objects and measurements to be a sequence of labels. Since the conditional random field makes no assumptions about the dependency structure between the observations and it allows non‐local dependencies between the state and the observations, the proposed method can not only fuse multiple cues including shape information and motion information to improve the stability of tracking, but also integrate moving object detection and object tracking quite well. At the same time, implementation of multi‐object tracking based on JCRFF with measurements from the laser range finder on a mobile robot is studied. Experimental results with the mobile robot developed in our lab show that the proposed method has higher precision and better stability than joint probabilities data association filter (JPDAF).