Estimations of Time-Varying Birth Cardinality Distribution and Birth Intensity in Gaussian Mixture CPHD Filter for Multi-Target Tracking

Abstract Cardinalized probability hypothesis density (CPHD) filter is a promising algorithm for multi-target tracking. However, the performance of standard CPHD is degraded when the target birth process is unknown and dynamically changing. To remove this limitation, a discrete kernel estimator in conjunction with exponential weighted moving average scheme is introduced in this study to recursively estimate the time-varying target birth cardinality distribution (i.e. probability distribution on number of newborn targets appearing during one sampling time) at each processing step. The target birth intensity is then updated according to the resulting estimated birth cardinality distribution. The estimated birth intensity and cardinality distribution can be employed by a tracker based on Gaussian mixture CPHD (GMCPHD) to modulate its filtering strength for target tracking. The performance of the proposed framework is demonstrated by both numerical simulations and experiment on a video surveillance dataset. Results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the delay of standard GMCPHD filter's response to the changes in the number of targets, and thus improve the accuracy of cardinality estimates. Satisfactory estimation of cardinality can be obtained even when there is a fast change in the rate of birth.