Two-dimensional tracking of trajectories of vehicles and obstacles for a headway alert application

In this article we present a tracking algorithm for estimating and filtering two-dimensional trajectories of vehicles and various other obstacles that may occur in a traffic scenario. This is important for developing a robust headway alert application which need reliable position and velocity information of potential dangerous obstacles in the path of a car. The algorithm is based on range and angular data from a laser range finder which is mounted in front of the host car. This data are filtered by a Kalman filter and processed in order to generate reliable obstacle distance and movement information.