Multiple Vessel Cooperative Localization under Random Finite Set Framework with Unknown Birth Intensities

The key challenge for multiple vessel cooperative localization is considered as data association, in which state-of-the-art approaches adopt a divide-and-conquer strategy to acquire measurement-to-target association. However, traditional approaches suffer both the computational time and accuracy issues. Here, an improved algorithm under Random Finite Set statistics (RFSs) is proposed, in which the Probability Hypothesis Density (PHD) filter is utilized to address the aforementioned issues, by jointly estimating both the number of vessels and the corresponding states in complex environments. Furthermore, to avoid the prior requirement constrain with respect to the PHD filter, the pattern recognition method is simultaneously utilized to calculate the birth intensities. Simulation results exhibit the proposed approach performs better than normal PHD for multiple vessel cooperative localization, in scenarios of unknown birth intensity.