A novel approach of noise statistics estimate using H∞ filter in target tracking

Noise statistics are essential for estimation performance. In practical situations, however, a priori information of noise statistics is often imperfect. Previous work on noise statistics identification in linear systems still requires initial prior knowledge of the noise. A novel approach is presented in this paper to solve this paradox. First, we apply the H-infinity filter to obtain the system state estimates without the common assumptions about the noise in conventional adaptive filters. Then by applying state estimates obtained from the H-infinity filter, better estimates of the noise mean and covariance can be achieved, which can improve the performance of estimation. The proposed approach makes the best use of the system knowledge without a priori information with modest computation cost, which makes it possible to be applied online. Finally, numerical examples are presented to show the efficiency of this approach.