Joint Target Detection and Tracking in Multipath Environment: A Variational Bayesian Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a variational Bayesian method for joint detection and tracking of multiple targets in multipath environments, effectively handling data association and state estimation to improve performance in challenging conditions.

Contribution

It proposes a novel Bayesian framework that unifies target detection, tracking, and multipath data association using variational inference, reducing computational complexity and error propagation.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods in low SNR scenarios

Effectively handles high-dimensional latent variable estimation

Reduces computational cost via loopy belief propagation

Abstract

We consider multitarget detection and tracking problem for a class of multipath detection system where one target may generate multiple measurements via multiple propagation paths, and the association relationship among targets, measurements and propagation paths is unknown. In order to effectively utilize multipath measurements from one target to improve detection and tracking performance, a tracker has to handle high-dimensional estimation of latent variables including target active/dormant meta-state, target kinematic state, and multipath data association. Based on variational Bayesian inference, we propose a novel joint detection and tracking algorithm that incorporates multipath data association, target detection and target state estimation in a unified Bayesian framework. The posterior probabilities of these latent variables are derived in a closed-form iterative manner, which is effective for reducing the performance deterioration caused by the coupling between estimation errors and identification errors. Loopy belief propagation is exploited to approximately calculate the probability of multipath data association, saving the computational cost significantly. Simulation results of over-the-horizon radar multitarget tracking show that the proposed algorithm outperforms multihypothesis multipath track fusion and multi-detection (hypothesis-oriented) multiple hypothesis tracker, especially under low signal-to-noise ratio circumstance.