Search Results (4)

Efficient multiple target tracking (MTT) is the key to achieving green, precision, and large-scale aquaculture, marine exploration, and marine farming. The traditional MTT methods based on Bayes estimation have some pending problems such as an unknown detection probability, random target newborn, complex data associations, and so on, which lead to an inefficient tracking performance. In this work, an efficient two-stage MTT method based on a YOLOv8 detector and SMC-PHD tracker, named EMTT-YOLO, is proposed to enhance the detection probability and then improve the tracking performance. Firstly, the first detection stage, the YOLOv8 model, which adopts several improved modules to improve the detection behaviors, is introduced to detect multiple targets and derive the extracted features such as the bounding box coordination, confidence, and detection probability. Secondly, the particles are built based on the previous detection results, and then the SMC-PHD filter, the second tracking stage, is proposed to track multiple targets. Thirdly, the lightweight data association Hungarian method is introduced to set up the data relevance to derive the trajectories of multiple targets. Moreover, comprehensive experiments are presented to verify the effectiveness of this two-stage tracking method of the EMTT-YOLO. Comparisons with other multiple target detection methods and tracking methods also demonstrate that the detection and tracking behaviors are improved greatly. Full article

In multi-target tracking, the sequential Monte Carlo probability hypothesis density (SMC-PHD) filter is a practical algorithm. Influenced by outliers under unknown heavy-tailed measurement noise, the SMC-PHD filter suffers severe performance degradation. In this paper, a robust SMC-PHD (RSMC-PHD) filter is proposed. In the proposed filter, Student-t distribution is introduced to describe the unknown heavy-tailed measurement noise where the degrees of freedom (DOF) and the scale matrix of the Student-t distribution are respectively modeled as a Gamma distribution and an inverse Wishart distribution. Furthermore, the variational Bayesian (VB) technique is employed to infer the unknown DOF and scale matrix parameters while the recursion estimation framework of the RSMC-PHD filter is derived. In addition, considering that the introduced Student- t distribution might lead to an overestimation of the target number, a strategy is applied to modify the updated weight of each particle. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed filter is effective with unknown heavy-tailed measurement noise. Full article

The sequential Monte Carlo probability hypothesis density (SMC-PHD) filter has been demonstrated to be a favorable method for multi-target tracking. However, the time-varying target states need to be extracted from the particle approximation of the posterior PHD, which is difficult to implement due to the unknown relations between the large amount of particles and the PHD peaks representing potential target locations. To address this problem, a novel multi-target state extraction algorithm is proposed in this paper. By exploiting the information of measurements and particle likelihoods in the filtering stage, we propose a validation mechanism which aims at selecting effective measurements and particles corresponding to detected targets. Subsequently, the state estimates of the detected and undetected targets are performed separately: the former are obtained from the particle clusters directed by effective measurements, while the latter are obtained from the particles corresponding to undetected targets via clustering method. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method yields better estimation accuracy and reliability compared to existing methods. Full article

In multi-target tracking, the key problem lies in estimating the number and states of individual targets, in which the challenge is the time-varying multi-target numbers and states. Recently, several multi-target tracking approaches, based on the sequential Monte Carlo probability hypothesis density (SMC-PHD) filter, have been presented to solve such a problem. However, most of these approaches select the transition density as the importance sampling (IS) function, which is inefficient in a nonlinear scenario. To enhance the performance of the conventional SMC-PHD filter, we propose in this paper two approaches using the cubature information filter (CIF) for multi-target tracking. More specifically, we first apply the posterior intensity as the IS function. Then, we propose to utilize the CIF algorithm with a gating method to calculate the IS function, namely CISMC-PHD approach. Meanwhile, a fast implementation of the CISMC-PHD approach is proposed, which clusters the particles into several groups according to the Gaussian mixture components. With the constructed components, the IS function is approximated instead of particles. As a result, the computational complexity of the CISMC-PHD approach can be significantly reduced. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches. Full article