A decentralised particle filtering algorithm for multi-target tracking across multiple flight vehicles

This paper presents a decentralised particle filtering algorithm that enables multiple vehicles to jointly track 3D features under limited communication bandwidth. This algorithm, applied within a decentralised data fusion (DDF) framework, deals with correlated estimation errors due to common past information when fusing two discrete particle sets. Our solution is to transform the particles into Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) for communication and fusion. Not only can decentralised fusion be approximated by GMMs, but this representation also provides summaries of the particle set. Less bandwidth per communication step is required to communicate a GMM than the particle set itself hence conversion to GMMs for communication is an advantage. Real airborne data is used to demonstrate the accuracy of our decentralised particle filtering algorithm for airborne tracking and mapping