Advanced Kalman Filtering Approaches to Bayesian State Estimation

Bayesian state estimation is a flexible framework to address relevant problems at the heart of existing and upcoming technologies. Application examples are obstacle tracking for driverless cars and indoor navigation using smartphone sensor data. Unfortunately, the mathematical solutions of the underlying theory cannot be translated to computer code in general. Therefore, this thesis discusses algorithms and approximations that are related to the Kalman filter (KF). Four scientific articles and an introduction with the relevant background on Bayesian state estimation theory and algorithms are included. Two articles discuss nonlinear Kalman filters, which employ the KF measurement update in nonlinear models. The numerous variants are presented in a common framework and the employed moment approximations are analyzed. Furthermore, their application to target tracking problems is discussed. A third article analyzes the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF), a Monte Carlo implementation of the KF that has been developed for high-dimensional geoscientific filtering problems. The EnKF is presented in a simple KF framework, including its challenges, important extensions, and relations to other filters. Whereas the aforementioned articles contribute to the understanding of existing algorithms, a fourth article devises novel filters and smoothers to address heavy-tailed noise. The development is based on Student’s t distribution and provides simple recursions in the spirit of the KF. The introduction and articles are accompanied by extensive simulation experiments