Estimating polynomial structures from radar data

Situation awareness for vehicular safety and autonomy functions includes knowledge of the drivable area. This area is normally constrained between stationary road-side objects as guard-rails, curbs, ditches and vegetation. We consider these as extended objects modeled by polynomials along the road, and propose an algorithm to track each polynomial based on noisy range and bearing detections, typically from a radar. A straightforward Kalman filter formulation of the problem suffers from the errors-in-variables (EIV) problem in that the noise enters the system model. We propose an EIV modification of the Kalman filter and demonstrates its usefulness using radar data from public roads.