Accelerating the Single Cluster PHD Filter with a GPU implementation

The SC-PHD filter is an algorithm which was designed to solve a class of multiple object estimation problems where it is necessary to estimate the state of a single-target parent process, in addition to estimating the state of a multi-object population which is conditioned on it. The filtering process usually employs a number of particles to represent the parent process, coupled each with a conditional PHD filter, which is computationally burdensome. In this article, an implementation is described which exploits the parallel nature of the filter to obtain considerable speed-up with the help of a GPU. Several considerations need to be taken into account to make efficient use of the GPU, and these are also described here.