A Priority Data Association Policy for Multitarget Tracking on Intelligent Vehicle Risk Assessment

In order to conduct risk assessment for collision-free decision making of intelligent vehicles in a complex road traffic environment, it is essential to conduct stable tracking and state estimation of multiple vehicle targets. Therefore, this paper proposes a multitarget tracking method in line with the priority data association rule. Firstly, a standard coordinate turn process model is deduced as the existence of translation and rotation of the vehicle on the two-dimensional ground plane. Secondly, an unscented Kalman filter algorithm is developed due to the nonlinear radar measurement model. Thirdly, a priority data association rule, which puts the targets in a priority queue according to the number of times they are associated, is designed to filter out noise, given that it is unlikely for a vehicle target as an inertial system to appear or disappear instantly in practice. In addition, the data association rule specifies that the closer the target is to the front of the queue, the more prioritized the association with the newly observed target would be. Finally, the track management algorithm is constructed. On this basis, a series of real vehicle tests were conducted on real roads with four typical scenarios. According to the test results, the proposed algorithm is effective in filtering out noise and is suboptimal as the nearest neighbor data association.