Cooperative Multiple Dynamic Object Tracking on Moving Vehicles Based on Sequential Monte Carlo Probability Hypothesis Density Filter

This paper proposes a generalized method for tracking of multiple objects from moving, cooperative vehicles -- bringing together an Unscented Kalman Filter for vehicle localization and extending a Sequential Monte Carlo Probability Hypothesis Density filter with a novel cooperative fusion algorithm for tracking. The latter ensures that the fusion of information from cooperating vehicles is not limited to a fully overlapping Field Of View (FOV), as usually assumed in popular distributed fusion literature, but also allows for a perceptual extension corresponding to the union of the vehicles' FOV. Our method hence allows for an overall extended perception range for all cooperative vehicles involved, while preserving same or improving the accuracy in the overlapping FOV. This method also successfully mitigates noisy sensor measurement and clutter, as well as localization inaccuracies of tracking vehicles using Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). Finally, we extensively evaluate our method using a high-fidelity simulator for vehicles of varying speed and trajectories.