An Improved Unscented Particle Filter with Global Sampling Strategy

Abstract

Particle filter (PF) has many variations and one of the most popular is the unscented particle filter (UPF). UPF uses the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) to generate particles in the PF framework and has a better performance than the standard PF. However, UPF suffers from its high computation complexity because it has to execute UKF to each particle to obtain proposal distribution. This paper gives an improved UPF aiming at reducing the computation complexity of the algorithm. In comparison to the standard UPF, the new strategy generates proposal distribution from the mean and covariance value of the whole particles instead of from each particle. Thus the improved algorithm utilizes the characteristics of the whole particles and only needs to perform UKF algorithm once to get the proposal distribution at each time step. Experimental results show that, compared to standard UPF, the improved algorithm reduces the time consumption greatly almost without performance degradation.