Adaptive Rao–Blackwellized Particle Filter and Its Evaluation for Tracking in Surveillance

Particle filters can become quite inefficient when being applied to a high-dimensional state space since a prohibitively large number of samples may be required to approximate the underlying density functions with desired accuracy. In this paper, by proposing an adaptive Rao–Blackwellized particle filter for tracking in surveillance, we show how to exploit the analytical relationship among state variables to improve the efficiency and accuracy of a regular particle filter. Essentially, the distributions of the linear variables are updated analytically using a Kalman filter which is associated with each particle in a particle filtering framework. Experiments and detailed performance analysis using both simulated data and real video sequences reveal that the proposed method results in more accurate tracking than a regular particle filter.