A tracker based on a CPHD filter approach for infrared applications

Since the derivation of PHD filter, a number of track management schemes have been proposed to adapt the PHD filter for determining the tracks of multiple objects. Nevertheless, the problem remains that such approaches can fail when targets are too close or are crossing. In this paper, we propose to improve the tracking by maintaining a set of locally-based trackers and managing the tracks with an assignment method. Furthermore, the new algorithm is based on a Gaussian mixture implementation of the CPHD filter, by clustering neighbouring Gaussians before the update step and updating each cluster with the CPHD filter update. In order to be computationally efficient, the algorithm includes gating techniques for the local trackers and constructs local cardinality distributions for the targets and clutter within the gated regions. An improvement in multi-object estimation performance has been experienced on both synthetic and real IR data scenarios.