Minimax particle filtering for tracking a highly maneuvering target

Summary In this paper, we propose a new framework of particle filtering that adopts the minimax strategy. In the approach, we minimize a maximized risk, and the process of the risk maximization is reflected when computing the weights of particles. This scheme results in the significantly reduced variance of the weights of particles that enables the robustness against the degeneracy problem, and we can obtain improved quality of particles. The proposed approach is robust against environmentally adverse scenarios, particularly when the state of a target is highly maneuvering. Furthermore, we can reduce the computational complexity by avoiding the computation of a complex joint probability density function. We investigate the new method by comparing its performance to that of standard particle filtering and verify its effectiveness through experiments. The employed strategy can be adopted for any other variants of particle filtering to enhance tracking performance.