Variational Bayesian Based Adaptive Shifted Rayleigh Filter for Bearings-Only Tracking in Clutters

This paper considers bearings-only target tracking in clutters with uncertain clutter probability. The traditional shifted Rayleigh filter (SRF), which assumes known clutter probability, may have degraded performance in challenging scenarios. To improve the tracking performance, a variational Bayesian-based adaptive shifted Rayleigh filter (VB-SRF) is proposed in this paper. The target state and the clutter probability are jointly estimated to account for the uncertainty in clutter probability. Performance of the proposed filter is evaluated by comparing with SRF and the probability data association (PDA)-based filters in two scenarios. Simulation results show that the proposed VB-SRF algorithm outperforms the traditional SRF and PDA-based filters especially in complex adverse scenarios in terms of track continuity, track accuracy and robustness with a little higher computation complexity.