Robust Multitarget Tracking in Interference Environments: A Message-Passing Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a robust multitarget tracking algorithm using message-passing that simultaneously estimates target and clutter states, effectively handling nonuniform, time-varying clutter environments.

Contribution

It proposes a novel message-passing based method that jointly estimates clutter and target states, incorporating signal strength features and hybrid data association for improved robustness.

Findings

Outperforms PHD and CPHD filters in simulations

Effectively handles nonuniform, time-varying clutter

Improves target discrimination accuracy

Abstract

Multitarget tracking in the interference environments suffers from the nonuniform, unknown and time-varying clutter, resulting in dramatic performance deterioration. We address this challenge by proposing a robust multitarget tracking algorithm, which estimates the states of clutter and targets simultaneously by the message-passing (MP) approach. We define the non-homogeneous clutter with a finite mixture model containing a uniform component and multiple nonuniform components. The measured signal strength is utilized to estimate the mean signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of targets and the mean clutter-to-noise ratio (CNR) of clutter, which are then used as additional feature information of targets and clutter to improve the performance of discrimination of targets from clutter. We also present a hybrid data association which can reason over correspondence between targets, clutter, and measurements. Then, a unified MP algorithm is used to infer the marginal posterior probability distributions of targets, clutter, and data association by splitting the joint probability distribution into a mean-field approximate part and a belief propagation part. As a result, a closed-loop iterative optimization of the posterior probability distribution can be obtained, which can effectively deal with the coupling between target tracking, clutter estimation and data association. Simulation results demonstrate the performance superiority and robustness of the proposed multitarget tracking algorithm compared with the probability hypothesis density (PHD) filter and the cardinalized PHD (CPHD) filter.