Road target tracking with an approximative Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filter

Using prior information about the road network will improve the estimation performance for a road constrained target significantly. Several estimation methods have been proposed to handle the multi-modality that arise in a road target tracking application. One popular filter suitable for this kind of non-linear problems is the particle filter, but a major drawback is that the particle filter requires a large amount of particles as the state dimension increases to maintain a good approximation of the filtering distribution. In this paper a Rao-Blackwellized particle filter based approach is proposed to reduce the dimension of the state space in road target tracking applications. Furthermore, it is also shown how prior information about the probability of detection can be used to improve the estimation performance further.