Penalized Gaussian mixture probability hypothesis density filter for multiple target tracking

Bayesian multi-target filter develops a theoretical framework for estimating the full multi-target posterior which is intractable in practice. The probability hypothesis density (PHD) is a practical solution for Bayesian multi-target filter which propagates the first order moment of the multi-target posterior instead of the full version. Recently, the Gaussian Mixture PHD (GM-PHD) has been proposed as an implementation of the PHD filter which provides a close form solution. The performance of this filter degrades when targets are moving near each other such as crossing targets. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called penalized GM-PHD (PGM-PHD) filter to improve this drawback. The simulation results provided for various probabilities of detection, clutter rates, targets velocities and frame rates indicate that the proposed method achieves better performance compared to the GM-PHD filter. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.