Rao-Blackwellised Particle Filter with Adaptive System Noise and its Evaluation for Tracking in Surveillance

In the visual tracking domain, Particle Filtering (PF) can become quite inefficient when being applied into high dimensional state space. Rao-Blackwellisation [1] has been shown to be an effective method to reduce the size of the state space by marginalizing out some of the variables analytically . In this paper based on our previous work [3] we propose an RBPF tracking algorithm with adaptive system noise model. Experiments using both simulation data and real data show that the proposed RBPF algorithm with adaptive noise variance improves its performance significantly over conventional Particle Filter tracking algorithm. The improvements manifest in three aspects: increased estimation accuracy, reduced variance for estimates and reduced particle numbers are needed to achieve the same level of accuracy. The last two performance improvements are evaluated in this paper using simulation data.