Group target tracking via jointly optimizing group partition and association

This paper considers the problem of indistinguishable group target tracking, where the individual targets within a group are closely spaced and resolvable, move in a coordinated manner, and the group splitting and merging may occur. In such a case, the performance of the commonly used multi-target tracking methods may be degraded. We focus on three aspects of the problem: deal with the group association, group splitting and merging, and derive the state estimates of the individual targets. First, in order to deal with the group partition and the group association globally, we propose a novel group target tracking method within the multiple hypothesis tracking (MHT) framework by extending the target partition and the measurement partition as parts of global hypotheses. An efficient algorithm is given to find the M-best group partition and association simultaneously. Second, we use the undirected graph to represent the interaction between groups and then obtain an identification method of the group splitting and merging. Third, in response to the state estimate of the group target, a group-individual Bayesian filter is designed to estimate the states of the virtual leader and the individual targets. Finally, numerical experiments are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.