Tracking rectangular and elliptical extended targets using laser measurements

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This paper considers tracking of extended targets using data from laser range sensors. Two types of extended target shapes are considered, rectangular and elliptical, and a method to compute predicted measurements and corresponding innovation covariances is suggested. The proposed method can easily be integrated into any tracking framework that relies on the use of an extended Kalman filter. Here, it is used together with a recently proposed Gaussian mixture probability hypothesis density (GM-PHD) filter for extended target tracking, which enables estimation of not only position, orientation, and size of the extended targets, but also estimation of extended target type (i.e. rectangular or elliptical). In both simulations and experiments using laser data, the versatility of the proposed tracking framework is shown. In addition, a simple measure to evaluate the extended target tracking results is suggested.