TARGET TRACKING USING KALMAN FILTER

Abstract
It is now quite common in the recursive approaches for motion estimation, to find
applicationsof the Kalman filtering technique both in time and frequency domains. In the block-
based approach, very few approaches are availableofthis technique to refine the estimationofmo
tio n vectors resulting from fast algorithms.. This paper proposes an object motion estimation
which uses the Kalman filtering technique to improve the motion estimates resulting from both
the three step algorithm and Kalman application. In the field of motion estimation for video
coding many techniques have been applied. It is now quite common to see the Kalman filtering
technique and some of its extensions to be used for the estimation of motion within image
sequences.

1. Particularly in the pixel-recursive approaches, which suit very much the Kalman
formulation, one finds various ways of applying this estimation technique both in the time
and frequency domains. On a very general perspective, we find use of Kalman filter (KF),
which implies linear state-space representations and the extended Kalman filter (EKF),
which uses the linearised expressions of non-linear state- space formulations. Moreover,
the parallel extended Kalman filter (PEKF) which consists of a parallel bank of EKF’s, is
often encountered in practice.
2. In the block-based motion-compensated prediction approaches, the most common
procedure is the block- matching technique.
3. Given a macro block in the current frame, the objective is to determine the block in a
reference frame (oneof the past for forward motion estimation or one of the futures for
backward motion estimation) in a certain search area that “best” matches the current macro
block according to a specific criterion. In most coding systems, the “best” match is found
using the mean absolute error (MAE) criterion. There are several well known algorithms
that perform the block matching motion estimation, among them being the full search
algorithm (FSA) that determines the motion vector of a macro block by computing the
MAE at each location in the search area. This is the simplest method, it provides the best
performance, but at a very high computational cost.
4. To reduce these computational requirements, several heuristic search strategies have been
developed, as for example the two-dimensional logarithmic search, the parallel one-
dimensional search, etc [3-51. These are often referred toas fast search algorithms. In fast
algorithms the procedures applied for motion estimation are of significantly lower
complexity, but yield a suboptimal solution in the sense that they may not avoid the
convergence of the MAE cost function to a local minimum instead of the global one.
Lately, some new fast strategies as well as motion estimation have been proposed. But,
very few applications are available of Kalman filtering for the estimation of motion
vectors.