Cooperative target tracking by multiple vehicles connected through inter-vehicle communication is a promising way to improve the estimation of target state. The effectiveness of cooperative tracking closely depends on the accuracy of relative localization between host and cooperative vehicles. However, the localization signal usually provided by the satellite-based navigation system is rather susceptible to dynamic driving environment, thus influencing the effectiveness of cooperative tracking. In order to implement reliable cooperative tracking, especially when the statistical characteristic of the relative localization noise is time-varying and uncertain, this paper presents a recursive Bayesian framework which jointly estimates the state of the target and the cooperative vehicle as well as the localization noise parameter. An online variational Bayesian inference algorithm is further developed to achieve efficient recursive estimate. The simulation results verify that our proposed algorithm can effectively boost the accuracy of target tracking when the localization noise dynamically changes over time.
Keywords: cooperative perception; joint state estimation; target tracking; variational Bayesian inference.