A Poisson multi-Bernoulli mixture filter with spawning based on Kullback–Leibler divergence minimization

Abstract

In the classical form, the Poisson Multi-Bernoulli Mixture (PMBM) filter uses a PMBM density to describe target birth, surviving, and death, which does not model the appearance of spawned targets. Although such a model can handle target birth, surviving, and death well, its performance may degrade when target spawning arises. The reason for this is that the original PMBM filter treats the spawned targets as birth targets, ignoring the surviving targets’ information. In this paper, we propose a Kullback–Leibler Divergence (KLD) minimization based derivation for the PMBM prediction step, including target spawning, in which the spawned targets are modeled using a Poisson Point Process (PPP). Furthermore, to improve the computational efficiency, three approximations are used to implement the proposed algorithm, such as the Variational Multi-Bernoulli (VMB) filter, the Measurement-Oriented marginal MeMBer/Poisson (MOMB/P) filter, and the Track-Oriented marginal MeMBer/Poisson (TOMB/P) filter. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the validity of the proposed filter by using the spawning model in these three approximations.