An RLS-Based Instantaneous Velocity Estimator for Extended Radar Tracking

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time RLS-based method for estimating the instantaneous velocity of dynamic objects using radar data, improving tracking accuracy in noisy and sparse conditions for autonomous vehicle applications.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel RLS-based velocity estimator and an integrated tracking pipeline capable of handling noisy radar data in real-time for extended object tracking.

Findings

The method effectively estimates velocity in high-noise scenarios.

The tracking pipeline operates within 30 ms per frame.

The approach is suitable for real-time autonomous vehicle systems.

Abstract

Radar sensors have become an important part of the perception sensor suite due to their long range and their ability to work in adverse weather conditions. However, several shortcomings such as large amounts of noise and extreme sparsity of the point cloud result in them not being used to their full potential. In this paper, we present a novel Recursive Least Squares (RLS) based approach to estimate the instantaneous velocity of dynamic objects in real-time that is capable of handling large amounts of noise in the input data stream. We also present an end-to-end pipeline to track extended objects in real-time that uses the computed velocity estimates for data association and track initialisation. The approaches are evaluated using several real-world inspired driving scenarios that test the limits of these algorithms. It is also experimentally proven that our approaches run in real-time with frame execution time not exceeding 30 ms even in dense traffic scenarios, thus allowing for their direct implementation on autonomous vehicles.