Spider monkey optimisation assisted particle filter for robust object tracking

Abstract

Particle filters (PFs) are sequential Monte Carlo methods that use particle representation of state‐space model to implement the recursive Bayesian filter for non‐linear and non‐Gaussian systems. Owing to this property, PFs have been extensively used for object tracking in recent years. Although PFs provide a robust object tracking framework, they suffer from shortcomings. Particle degeneracy and particle impoverishment brought by the resampling step result in abysmal construction of posterior probability density function (PDF) of the state. To overcome these problems, this work amalgamates two characteristics of population‐based heuristic optimisation algorithms: exploration and exploitation with PF implementing dynamic resampling method. The aim of optimisation is to distribute particles in high‐likelihood area according to the cognitive effect and improve quality of particles, while the objective of dynamic resampling is to maintain diversity in the particle set. This work uses very efficient spider monkey optimisation to achieve this. Furthermore, to test the efficiency of the proposed algorithm, experiments were carried out on one‐dimensional state estimation problem, bearing only tracking problem, standard videos and synthesised videos. Metrics obtained show that the proposed algorithm outplays simple PF, particle swarm optimisation based PF, and cuckoo search based PF, and effectively handles different challenges inherent in object tracking.

Keywords

• spider monkey optimisation assisted particle filter
• sequential Monte Carlo methods
• particle representation
• state-space model
• recursive Bayesian filter
• PF