Variants of extended Kalman filtering approaches for Bayesian tracking

Summary We provide a tutorial for a number of variants of the extended Kalman filter (EKF). In these methods, so called, sigma points are employed to tackle the nonlinearity of problems. The sigma points exactly represent the mean and the variance of the state distribution function in a dynamic state equation. The initially developed EKF variant, that is, unscented Kalman filter (UKF) (also called sigma point Kalman filter) shows enhanced performance compared with that of conventional EKF in the literature. Another variant, which is not well known, is central difference Kalman filter (CDKF) whose way to approximate the nonlinearity is based on the Sterling's polynomial interpolation formula instead of the Taylor series. Endeavor to reduce the computational load resulted in the development of square root versions of both UKF and CDKF, that is, square root unscented Kalman filter and square root central difference Kalman filter (SR‐CDKF). These SR‐versions are supposed to be numerically more stable than their original versions because the state covariance is guaranteed to be positive definite by avoiding the step of matrix decomposition. In this paper, we provide the step‐by‐step algorithms of above‐mentioned EKF variants with their pros and cons. We apply these filtering methods to a number of problems in various disciplines for performance assessment in terms of both mean squared error (MSE) and processing speed. Furthermore, we show how to optimize the filters in terms of MSE performance depending on diverse scenarios. According to simulation results, CDKF and SR‐CDKF show the best MSE performance in most scenarios; particularly, SR‐CDKF shows faster processing speed than that of CDKF. Therefore, we justify that SR‐CDKF is the most efficient and the best approach among the Kalman variants including the EKF for various nonlinear problems. The motivation of this paper targets at the contribution to the disseminative usage of the Kalman variants approaches, particularly, SR‐CDKF taking advantage of its estimating performance and high processing speed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.