Road-Constrained Target Tracking and Identification Using a Particle Filter

Sequential Monte Carlo methods have attracted the attention of the tracking community as a solution to Bayesian estimation particularly for nonlinear problems. Several attributes of particle filters support their use in jointly tracking and identifying ground targets in a road-constrained network. First, since the target dynamics are simulated, propagating a target within a constrained state space is handled quite naturally since the particle filter is not restricted to propagating Gaussian PDFs. Furthermore, a particle filter can approximate the PDF of a mixture of continuous random variables (the target kinematic state) and discrete random variables (the target ID) which is necessary for the joint tracking and identification problem. Given HRRGMTI measurements of a target, we propose to jointly estimate a target’s kinematic state and identification by propagating the joint PDF of the target kinematic state (position and velocity) and target ID. In this way, we capitalize on the inherent coupling between the target’s feature measurement (the HRR profile) and the target’s kinematic state. In addition to the coupling between a target’s feature measurement and the target’s kinematic state, there exists a coupling between a target’s dynamics and the target’s ID which can also be exploited through particle filtering methods. We develop the particle filtering algorithm for tracking and identifying ground targets in a road-constrained environment and present simulation results for a two-class problem.