Research on a Particle Filtering Multi-Target Tracking Algorithm for Distributed Systems

The growth of unmanned aerial vehicle applications in the low-altitude economy demand advanced multi-target tracking systems. Unlike traditional approaches that assume independent measurements, distributed systems generate coupled measurements containing additional target relationship information. This paper proposes a novel distributed particle filtering algorithm through introducing the coupled measurement into the conventional particle filtering method. In the proposed method, we fuse direct and coupled measurements via optimization and then build a cost function to optimize the particle weights. Comparative evaluations across motion models, noise levels, and the number of targets demonstrate the outperforming performance of the proposed method compared to conventional particle filtering and the unscented Kalman filtering algorithm, with more than 7% accuracy improvement over baselines. The results prove particular robustness to measurement noise and the increasing number of targets.