Improved Multiple Hypothesis Tracker for Joint Multiple Target Tracking and Feature Extraction

Feature-aided tracking can often yield improved tracking performance over the standard multiple target tracking (MTT) algorithms. However, in many applications, the feature signal of the targets consists of sparse Fourier-domain signals. It changes quickly and nonlinearly in the time domain, and the feature measurements are corrupted by missed detections and misassociations. In this paper, we develop a feature-aided multiple hypothesis tracker for joint MTT and feature extraction in dense target environments. We use the atomic norm constraint to formulate the sparsity of feature signal and use the ℓ₁-norm to formulate the sparsity of the corruption induced by misassociations. Based on the sparse representation, the feature signal are estimated by solving a semidefinite program. With the estimated feature signal, refiltering is performed to estimate the kinematic states of the targets, where the association makes use of both kinematic and feature information. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithm.