Towards Accurate Vehicle State Estimation under Non-Gaussian Noises

Vehicle state including location and motion information plays an important role in various applications such as Internet of Vehicles (IoV), autonomous cars, and driving safety monitoring. Achieving accurate vehicle state is a challenging task in those applications due to the noise disturbances. Recent studies suggest that noise is not generally Gaussian distributed and many physical environments can be handled more accurately as non-Gaussian rather than Gaussian model. Inspired by this observation, we strive to improve the vehicle state estimation by investigating the effects of that assumption when process and measurement noises are non-Gaussian distributed. Here, process noise represents the noise during the state information processing. To that end, we exploit the generalized error distribution (GED) to compute the non-Gaussian probability density during the vehicle state estimation. We then derive extensive theoretical analysis targeting to estimate the parameters such as the mean and the variance (or covariance matrix) related to both process and measurement noises and reduce the computational burden of the distribution. Further, we propose a non-Gaussian particle filter for vehicle state estimation ( ${n}$ GPF-VSE) algorithm wherein we utilize the genetic operator resampling (GOR) technique to enhance the efficiency of particle filter (PF) relying on the selection of the importance sampling distribution. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, we conduct numerical simulations on the popular system of state-space equations and a real experiment for estimating the vehicle state. The results from the numerical simulations, experimental data and the statistical evaluation confirm that ${n}$ GPF-VSE outperforms existing methods in terms of vehicle state accuracy.