A Random Finite Set Sensor Control Approach for Vision-based Multi-object Search-While-Tracking

Through automatic control, intelligent sensors can be manipulated to obtain the most informative measurements about objects in their environment. In object tracking applications, sensor actions are chosen based on the predicted improvement in estimation accuracy, or information gain. Although random finite set theory provides a formalism for measuring information gain for multi-object tracking problems, predicting the information gain remains computationally challenging. This paper presents a new tractable approximation of the random finite set expected information gain applicable to multi-object search and tracking. The approximation presented in this paper accounts for noisy measurements, missed detections, false alarms, and object appearance/disappearance. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated through a ground vehicle tracking problem using real video data from a remote optical sensor.