Direction‐Based Modified Particle Filter for Vehicle Tracking

This research proposes a modified particle filter to increase the accuracy of vehicle tracking in a noisy and occluded medium. In our proposed method for vehicle tracking, the direction angle of a target vehicle is calculated. The angular difference between the motion direction of the target vehicle and each particle of the particle filter is observed. Particles are filtered and weighted depending on their angular distance to the motion direction. Those particles moving in a direction similar to that of the target vehicle are assigned larger weights; this, in turn, increases their probability in a given likelihood function (part of the process of estimation of a target's state parameters). The proposed method is compared against a condensation algorithm. Our results show that the proposed method improves the stability of a particle filter tracker and decreases the particle consumption.