Tracking ground targets with road constraint using multiple hypotheses tracking

Data association in tracking multiple targets is of vital importance for airborne surveillance radar. Multiple hypotheses tracking (MHT) is generally accepted as the preferred method for solving the data association problem in modern multiple-target tracking (MTT) systems. However, there are usually too many hypotheses to process slowly. In this paper, map information has been used to prevent unnecessary MHT track branches and improve the state estimator. The simulation results show that this new algorithm improves tracking performance in realistic environment and effectively brings down the number of track branches, while reducing largely calculating time with better accuracy.