Robust Extended Object Tracking Based on Variational Bayesian for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Under Unknown Outliers

Highlights: What are the main findings? A dual-extended distortion and hierarchical model is developed within a variational Bayesian framework to facilitate accurate posterior approximation. The proposed robust extended object tracking based on variational Bayesian handles unknown outliers, surpassing recent methods. What is the implication of the main finding? The proposed adaptive method can effectively handle the challenge of extended object tracking under unknown outliers, which is caused by factors such as UAV interference or partial object occlusion. The experiment results validate the superior effectiveness and robustness of our approach, offering critical implications for UAV perception systems in the accurate estimation of object extension under complex operational environments. The application of extended object tracking (EOT) in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has increasingly gained attention in recent years. However, EOT is often corrupted by heavy-tailed measurement noise due to outliers, which can be caused by factors such as UAV interference or partial object occlusion. Student’s t distribution (STD) is widely adopted for modeling this type of noise, and the estimation accuracy of EOT is highly dependent on prior knowledge of the noise. Although existing methods typically assume such prior knowledge is available, this assumption often fails in practice. Furthermore, the fact that the posterior of the measurement noise is estimated leads to coupling. This coupling, which cannot be adequately resolved by existing methods, prevents the direct derivation of variational Bayesian (VB) inference. We propose an adaptive EOT approach that employs a decoupling model to address unknown outliers in UAV tracking. Then, a novel dual-extended distortion model from sensor’s FoV is proposed to address the coupling. Subsequently, the measurement likelihood is formulated as a hierarchical structure, where the degrees of freedom (DoF) and measurement noise covariance matrix (MNCM) are modeled by Gamma and inverse Wishart (IW) distributions, respectively. The hierarchical structure allows the model to account for unknown noise characteristics. Based on these models, we derive an approach recursively for estimation. Finally, the performance of the proposed approach is validated with both simulated and real-world datasets. The results demonstrate the superior effectiveness and robustness of our approach.