A fast ellipse extended target PHD filter using box-particle implementation

This paper presents a box-particle implementation of the ellipse extended target probability hypothesis density (ET-PHD) filter, called the ellipse extended target box particle PHD (EET-BP-PHD) filter, where the extended targets are described as a Poisson model developed by Gilholm et al. and the term “box” is here equivalent to the term “interval” used in interval analysis. The proposed EET-BP-PHD filter is capable of dynamically tracking multiple ellipse extended targets and estimating the target states and the number of targets, in the presence of clutter measurements, false alarms and missed detections. To derive the PHD recursion of the EET-BP-PHD filter, a suitable measurement likelihood is defined for a given partitioning cell, and the main implementation steps are presented along with the necessary box approximations and manipulations. The limitations and capabilities of the proposed EET-BP-PHD filter are illustrated by simulation examples. The simulation results show that a box-particle implementation of the ET-PHD filter can avoid the high number of particles and reduce computational burden, compared to a particle implementation of that for extended target tracking.