A Hypergraph Matching Labeled Multi-Bernoulli Filter for Group Targets Tracking

This paper addresses the association problem of tracking closely spaced targets in group or formation. In the Labeled Multi-Bernoulli Filter (LMB), the weight of a hypothesis is directly affected by the distance between prediction and measurement. This may generate false associations when dealing with the closely spaced multiple targets. Thus we consider utilizing structure information among the group or formation. Since, the relative position relation of the targets in group or formation varies slightly within a short time, the targets are considered as nodes of a topological structure. Then the position relation among the targets is modeled as a hypergraph. The hypergraph matching method is used to resolve the association matrix. At last, with the structure prior information introduced, the new joint cost matrix is re-derived to generate hypotheses, and the filtering recursion is implemented in a Gaussian mixture way. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively deal with group targets and is superior to the LMB filter in tracking precision and accuracy.