De-cluttering with integrated probabilistic data association for multisensor multitarget ACC vehicle tracking

In the field of automotive environment perception, the state estimation problem of other road users with sensors like video, radar, lidar, or combinations of them has been solved for years now. However, driver assistance systems like ACC are only available for restricted environments like highways and rural roads today. Especially in complex environments, the uncertainty of target existence induced from missing and false detections becomes the dominating error source. Traditional approaches for track verification are rule based systems and trained classifiers. In this contribution, we present an automotive application of the Integrated Probabilistic Data Association (IPDA) Filter superseding additional validation modules by modeling the probabilistic knowledge about both, state and existence, as temporal Markov chains and computing filter estimates for both issues. The temporal evolution and measurement update models for state and existence estimation are presented for the vehicle tracking problem as well as results from a sensor fusion setup with video and multibeam lidar.