Histogram-PMHT Unfettered

The Histogram Probabilistic Multi-Hypothesis Tracker (H-PMHT) is a parametric mixture-fitting approach to track-before-detect. The original implementations of H-PMHT dealt with Gaussian shaped targets with fixed or known extent. More recent applications have addressed other special cases of the target shape. This article reviews these recent extensions and consolidates them into a new unified framework for targets with arbitrary appearance. The framework adopts a stochastic appearance model that describes the sensor response to each target and describes filters and smoothers for several example models. The article also demonstrates that H-PMHT can be interpreted as the decomposition of multi-target track-before-detect into decoupled single target track-before-detect using the notion of associated images.