Ground Vehicle Tracking Using Context-Based Sojourn Time Dependent Markov Model and Pseudo-Measurement

Tracking maneuvering vehicles in complex dynamic environment is a challenging problem for advanced driver assistance system and autonomous driving systems. Most conventional vehicle tracking algorithms can not model the vehicle dynamic exactly because of the uncertain moving behavior. However, due to the on-road capability, vehicles have to subject to various constraints imposed by traffic rules and roads. Taking advantage of those context information can refine and improve the performance of tracking as it provides additional prior information for vehicles’ dynamic behavior. To achieve this goal, this paper presents a novel context-enhanced tracking approach that exploits the context information to reduce the uncertainty of dynamic estimation. A new context-based sojourn-time dependent semi-Markov (STDM) model, called sojourn-time dependent semi-Markov variable structure interacting multiple model (STDM-VSIMM), is proposed to describe the vehicle’s longitudinal acceleration process. In order to cope with the context information into STDM model, a context-based Bayesian network is presented to replace the fixed model transition probabilities with sojourn-time dependent transition probabilities. Compared with traditional interacting multiple model tracking with fixed transition probability, this adaptation switching strategy makes the vehicle motion sequence closer to the natural behavior and improve the tracking performance. Furthermore, a novel pseudo-measurement is constructed to formulate the road-map constraint in tracking process for reducing uncertain on mobility constraints. Simulation results shows that the proposed STDM-VSIMM can achieve better performance after considering the context.