A novel nonlinear least squares approach to highly maneuvering target tracking

International audienceTrajectories of aerial and marine vehicles are typically made of a succession of smooth trajectories, linked by abrupt changes, i.e., maneuvers. Notably, modern highly maneuvering targets are capable of very brutal changes in the heading with accelerations up to 15 g. As a result, we model the target behavior using piecewise deterministic Markov models, driven by parameters that jump at unknown times. Over the past years, real-time (or incremental) optimization based smoothing methods have become a popular alternative to nonlinear filters, such as the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), owing to the successive relinearizations that mitigate the linearization errors that inherently affect the EKF estimates. In the present paper, we propose to combine such methods for tracking the target during non-jumping phases with a probabilistic approach to detect jumps. Our algorithm is shown to compare favorably to the state of the art Interacting Multiple Model (IMM) algorithm, especially in terms of target's velocity estimation, on a set of meaningful and challenging trajectories