Directional Particle Filter Using Online Threshold Adaptation for Vehicle Tracking

Abstract

This paper presents an extended particle filter to increase the accuracy and decrease the computation load of vehicle tracking. Particle filter has been the subject of extensive interest in video-based tracking which is capable of solving nonlinear and non-Gaussian problems. However, there still exist problems such as preventing unnecessary particle consumption, reducing the computational burden, and increasing the accuracy. We aim to increase the accuracy without an increase in computation load. In proposed method, we calculate the direction angle of the target vehicle. The angular difference between the direction of the target vehicle and each particle of the particle filter is observed. Particles are filtered and weighted, based on their angular difference. Particles with angular difference greater than a threshold is eliminated and the remaining are stored with greater weights in order to increase their probability for state estimation. Threshold value is very critical for performance. Thus, instead of having a constant threshold value, proposed algorithm updates it online. The first advantage of our algorithm is that it prevents the system from failures caused by insufficient amount of particles. Second advantage is to reduce the risk of using unnecessary number of particles in tracking which causes computation load. Proposed algorithm is compared against camshift, direction-based particle filter and condensation algorithms. Results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the other methods in terms of accuracy, tracking duration and particle consumption.