Hybrid Poisson and multi-Bernoulli filters

TL;DR

This paper proposes a hybrid filtering approach combining Poisson and multi-Bernoulli filters for multi-target tracking, improving speed and efficiency by recycling low-probability tracks into a Poisson component.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method of recycling Bernoulli components into the Poisson part, reducing the number of tracks needed while maintaining performance.

Findings

Recycling Bernoulli components speeds up track initiation.

Maintaining a Poisson component improves detection of undetected targets.

The method achieves similar tracking accuracy with fewer tracks.

Abstract

The probability hypothesis density (PHD) and multi-target multi-Bernoulli (MeMBer) filters are two leading algorithms that have emerged from random finite sets (RFS). In this paper we study a method which combines these two approaches. Our work is motivated by a sister paper, which proves that the full Bayes RFS filter naturally incorporates a Poisson component representing targets that have never been detected, and a linear combination of multi-Bernoulli components representing targets under track. Here we demonstrate the benefit (in speed of track initiation) that maintenance of a Poisson component of undetected targets provides. Subsequently, we propose a method of recycling, which projects Bernoulli components with a low probability of existence onto the Poisson component (as opposed to deleting them). We show that this allows us to achieve similar tracking performance using a fraction of the number of Bernoulli components (i.e., tracks).