Tracking spawning objects

Many multi-object tracking scenarios are complicated by the fact that an object of interest may spawn additional objects which, for some period of time, follow roughly the same trajectory as the original object and then fall away. The challenge is then to discriminate the original object from the spawned ancillaries in a timely fashion. This study proposes a solution to this problem based on the increasingly well-known multi-object track-before-detect algorithm called the cardinalised probability hypothesis density (CPHD) filter. Precisely, the authors assume zero false alarms (ZFA) in the CPHD filter, and apply the proposed scheme to linear and non-linear simulation scenarios based on widely used object-trajectory and sensor models. The authors have also demonstrated that a Gaussian mixture implementation of the ZFA-CPHD filter (i) establishes stable estimates of object number, (ii) rapidly eliminates the ancillary objects and (iii) detects and accurately estimates the trajectory of the original object of interest.