Section: New Results

Particle association measures and multiple target tracking

The following result has been obtained by P. Del Moral (Inria CQFD) in collaboration with J. Houssineau.

In the last decade, the area of multiple target tracking has witnessed the introduction of important concepts and methods, aiming at establishing principled approaches for dealing with the estimation of multiple objects in an efficient way. One of the most successful classes of multi-object filters that have been derived out of these new grounds includes all the variants of the Probability Hypothesis Density (phd) filter. In spite of the attention that these methods have attracted, their theoretical performances are still not fully understood. In this chapter, we first focus on the different ways of establishing the equations of the phd filter, using a consistent set of notations. The objective is then to introduce the idea of observation path, upon which association measures are defined. We will see how these concepts highlight the structure of the first moment of the multi-object distributions in time, and how they allow for devising solutions to practical estimation problems.