Road-assisted multiple target tracking in clutter

In many tracking applications map information is available, giving useful prior information about the movement of targets. In this paper we show how map information can be used to assist in tracking of an unknown and time varying number of targets, without constraining targets to always travel along roads. A continuous time on-/off-road switching motion model is developed, and a fully Bayesian sequential MCMC inference scheme, based on the MCMC-Particles algorithm, is given. This is demonstrated by tracking a variable number of realistic ground targets, fusing simulated data from multiple airborne camera sensors on two sensor platforms. MCMC-Particles is found to out-perform a Resample-Move particle flter for this problem.