Fast mutual exclusion
Simon R. Maskell, Mark Briers, Robert W Wright · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2004
A method is presented that circumvents the combinatorial explosion often assumed to exist when summing probabilities of joint association events in a multiple target tracking context. The approach involves no approximations in the summation and while the number of joint events grows exponentially with teh number of targets, the computational complexity of the approach is substantially less than exponential. Multiple target tracking algorithms that use this summation include mutual exclusion in a particle filtering context and the Joint Probabilistic Data Association Filter, a Kalman Filter based algorithm. The perceived computational expense associated with this combinatorial explosion has meant that such algorithms have been restricted to applications involving only a handful of targets. The approach presented here makes it possible to use such algorithms with a large number of targets.