The high-precision indoor positioning technology has gradually become one of the research hotspots in indoor mobile robots. Relax and Recover (RAR) is an indoor positioning algorithm using distance observations. The algorithm restores the robot's trajectory through curve fitting and does not require time synchronization of observations. The positioning can be successful with few observations. However, the algorithm has the disadvantages of poor resistance to gross errors and cannot be used for real-time positioning. In this paper, while retaining the advantages of the original algorithm, the RAR algorithm is improved with the adaptive Kalman filter (AKF) based on the innovation sequence to improve the anti-gross error performance of the original algorithm. The improved algorithm can be used for real-time navigation and positioning. The experimental validation found that the improved algorithm has a significant improvement in accuracy when compared to the original RAR. When comparing to the extended Kalman filter (EKF), the accuracy is also increased by 12.5%, which can be used for high-precision positioning of indoor mobile robots.

In resent years, providing location services for mobile targets in a closed environment has been a growing interest. In order to provide good localization and tracking performance for drones in GPS-denied scenarios, this paper proposes a multi-tag radio frequency identification (RFID) system that is easy to equip and does not take up the limited resources of the drone which is not susceptible to processor performance and cost constraints compared with computer vision based approaches. The passive RFID tags, no battery equipped, have an ultra-high resolution of millimeter level. We attach multiple tags to the drone and form multiple sets of virtual antenna arrays during motion, avoiding arranging redundant antennas in applications, and calibrating the speed chain to improve tracking performance. After combining the strap-down inertial navigation system (SINS) carried by the drone, we have established a coupled integration model that can suppress the drift error of SINS with time. The experiment was designed in bi-dimensional and three-dimensional scenarios, and the integrated positioning system based on SINS/RFID was evaluated. Finally, we discussed the impact of some parameters, this innovative approach is verified in real scenarios.

The blind multichannel identification is useful in many applications. Although many approaches have been proposed to address this challenging problem, the adaptive filtering-based methods are attractive due to their computational efficiency and good convergence property. The multichannel normalized least mean-square (MCNLMS) algorithm is easy to implement, but it converges very slowly for a correlated input. The multichannel affine projection algorithm (MCAPA) is thus proposed to speed up the convergence. However, the convergence of the MCNLMS and MCAPA is still unsatisfactory in practice. In this paper, we propose a time-domain Kalman filtering approach to the blind multichannel identification problem. Specifically, the proposed adaptive Kalman filter is based on the cross relation method and also uses more past input vectors to explore the decorrelation property. Simulation results indicate that the proposed method outperforms the MCNLMS and MCAPA significantly in terms of the initial convergence and tracking capability.

This paper presents a radio-based real-time moving object tracking method based on Kalman filtering using a phase-difference compensation technique and a non-uniform pulse transmission scheme. Conventional Kalman-based tracking methods often require time, amplitude, phase information and their derivatives for each receiver antenna; however, their location estimation accuracy does not become good even with many transmitting pulses. The presented method employs relative phase-difference information and a non-uniform pulse generation scheme, which can greatly reduce the number of transmitting pulses while preserving the tracking accuracy. Its performance is evaluated in comparison with that of conventional methods.

To track the players and shuttlecock in broadcast badminton video is a challenge, especially for tracking the small size and fast moving shuttlecock. There are many situations that may cause occlusion or misdetection. In this paper, a method is proposed to track players and shuttlecock in broadcast badminton videos. We apply adaptive Kalman filter, trajectory confidence estimation and confidence-update (Location Similarity and Relative Motion Relation, RMR) to improve the accuracy of object trajectories. In our experiments, the proposed method significantly enhance the tracking success rate of players and shuttlecock.

This study proposes a maximum-likelihood-estimation method for a quadrotor UAV given the existence of sensor delays. The state equation of the UAV is nonlinear, and thus, we propose an approximated method that consists of two steps. The first step estimates the past state based on the delayed output through an extended Kalman filter. The second step involves calculating an estimate of the present state by simulating the original system from the past to the present. It is proven that the proposed method provides an approximated maximum-likelihood-estimation. The effectiveness of the estimator is verified by performing experiments.

Tracking-by-detection methods consider tracking task as a continuous detection problem applied over video frames. Modern tracking-by-detection trackers have online learning ability; the update stage is essential because it determines how to modify the classifier inherent in a tracker. However, most trackers search for the target within a fixed region centered at the previous object position; thus, they lack spatiotemporal consistency. This becomes a problem when the tracker detects an incorrect object during short-term occlusion. In addition, the scale of the bounding box that contains the target object is usually assumed not to change. This assumption is unrealistic for long-term tracking, where the scale of the target varies as the distance between the target and the camera changes. The accumulation of errors resulting from these shortcomings results in the drift problem, i.e. drifting away from the target object. To resolve this problem, we present a drift-free, online learning-based tracking-by-detection method using a single static camera. We improve the latent structured support vector machine (SVM) tracker by designing a more robust tracker update step by incorporating two Kalman filter modules: the first is used to predict an adaptive search region in consideration of the object motion; the second is used to adjust the scale of the bounding box by accounting for the background model. We propose a hierarchical search strategy that combines Bhattacharyya coefficient similarity analysis and Kalman predictors. This strategy facilitates overcoming occlusion and increases tracking efficiency. We evaluate this work using publicly available videos thoroughly. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art trackers.

The combination of GPS measurements with the dynamic model via a Kalman filter or an extended Kalman filter, also known as GPS based reduced dynamic orbit determination (RDOD) techniques, have been widely used for accurate and real time navigation of satellites in low earth orbit (LEO). In previous studies, the GPS measurement noise variance is empirically taken as a constant, which is not reasonable because of insufficient prior information or dynamic environment. An improper estimate of the measurement noise may lead to poor performance or even divergence of the filter. In this letter, an adaptive extended Kalman filter (AEKF)-based approach using GPS dual-frequency pseudo-range measurements is presented, where the GPS pseudo-range measurement noise variance is adaptively estimated by the Carrier to Noise Ratio (C/N0) from the tracking loop of GPS receiver. The simulation results show that the proposed AEKF approach can achieve apparent improvements of the position accuracy and almost brings no extra computational burdens for satellite borne processor.

This study investigates a real-time joint channel and hyperparameter estimation method for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing mobile communications. The channel frequency response of the pilot subcarrier and its fixed hyperparameters (such as channel statistics) are estimated using a Liu and West filter (LWF), which is based on the state-space model and sequential Monte Carlo method. For the first time, to our knowledge, we demonstrate that the conventional LWF biases the hyperparameter due to a poor estimate of the likelihood caused by overfitting in noisy environments. Moreover, this problem cannot be solved by conventional smoothing techniques. For this, we modify the conventional LWF and regularize the likelihood using a Kalman smoother. The effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed via numerical analysis. When both of the Doppler frequency and delay spread hyperparameters are unknown, the conventional LWF significantly degrades the performance, sometimes below that of least squares estimation. By avoiding the hyperparameter estimation failure, our method outperforms the conventional approach and achieves good performance near the lower bound. The coding gain in our proposed method is at most 10 dB higher than that in the conventional LWF. Thus, the proposed method improves the channel and hyperparameter estimation accuracy. Derived from mathematical principles, our proposal is applicable not only to wireless technology but also to a broad range of related areas such as machine learning and econometrics.

Maneuvering target tracking under mixed line-of-sight/non-line-of-sight (LOS/NLOS) conditions has received considerable interest in the last decades. In this paper, a hierarchical interacting multiple model (HIMM) method is proposed for estimating target position under mixed LOS/NLOS conditions. The proposed HIMM is composed of two layers with Markov switching model. The purpose of the upper layer, which is composed of two interacting multiple model (IMM) filters in parallel, is to handle the switching between the LOS and the NLOS environments. To estimate the target kinetic variables (position, speed and acceleration), the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) with the current statistical (CS) model is used in the lower-layer. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method, which obtains better tracking accuracy than the traditional IMM.

This paper proposes a method based on modulation transfer function (MTF) to restore the power envelope of noisy reverberant speech by using a Kalman filter with linear prediction (LP). Its advantage is that it can simultaneously suppress the effects of noise and reverberation by restoring the smeared MTF without measuring room impulse responses. This scheme has two processes: power envelope subtraction and power envelope inverse filtering. In the subtraction process, the statistical properties of observation noise and driving noise for power envelope are investigated for the criteria of the Kalman filter which requires noise to be white and Gaussian. Furthermore, LP coefficients drastically affect the Kalman filter performance, and a method is developed for deriving LP coefficients from noisy reverberant speech. In the dereverberation process, an inverse filtering method is applied to remove the effects of reverberation. Objective experiments were conducted under various noisy reverberant conditions to evaluate how well the proposed Kalman filtering method based on MTF improves the signal-to-error ratio (SER) and correlation between restored power envelopes compared with conventional methods. Results showed that the proposed Kalman filtering method based on MTF can improve SER and correlation more than conventional methods.

This paper proposes the MIMO MC-CDMA channel estimation method for the various mobile environments. The distinctive feature of the proposed method is possible to robustly estimate with respect to the mobile velocity using the Kalman filter with the colored driving source. Effectiveness of the proposed method are shown by computer simulations.

In cognitive radar systems (CRSs), target scattering coefficients (TSC) can be utilized to improve the performance of target identification and classification. This work considers the problem of TSC estimation for temporally correlated target. Multiple receive antennas are adopted to receive the echo waveforms, which are interfered by the signal-dependent clutter. Unlike existing estimation methods in time domain, a novel estimation method based on Kalman filtering (KF) is proposed in frequency domain to exploit the temporal TSC correlation, and reduce the complexity of subsequent waveform optimization. Additionally, to minimize the mean square error of estimated TSC at each KF iteration, in contrary to existing works, we directly model the design process as an optimization problem, which is non-convex and cannot be solved efficiently. Therefore, we propose a novel method, similar in some way to semi-definite programming (SDP), to convert the non-convex problem into a convex one. Simulation results demonstrate that the estimation performance can be significantly improved by the KF estimation with optimized waveform.

The indoor fingerprinting localization technology has received more attention in recent years due to the increasing demand of the indoor location based services (LBSs). However, a high quality of the LBS requires a positioning solution with high accuracy and low computational complexity. The particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique, which emulates the social behavior of a flock of birds to search for the optimal solution of a special problem, can provide attractive performance in terms of accuracy, computational efficiency and convergence rate. In this paper, we adopt the PSO algorithm to estimate the location information. First, our system establishes a Bayesian-rule based objective function. It then applies PSO to identify the optimal solution. We also propose a hybrid access point (AP) selection method to improve the accuracy, and analyze the effects of the number and the initial positions of particles on the localization performance. In order to mitigate the estimation error, we use the Kalman Filter to update the initial estimated location via the PSO algorithm to track the trail of the mobile user. Our analysis indicates that our method can reduce the computational complexity and improve the real-time performance. Numerous experiments also demonstrate that our proposed localization and tracking system achieve higher localization accuracy than existing systems.

This paper proposes a novel scheme for sequential orthogonal frequency division multiplexing channel estimation on the receiver side.The scheme comprises two methods: one improves estimation accuracy and the other reduces computational complexity. Based on a state-space model, the first method appropriately considers frequency correlation in an approach that derives a narrow-band channel gain for multiple pilot subcarriers; such consideration of frequency correlation leads to an averaging effect in the frequency domain. The second method is based on the first one and forces the observation matrix into a sparse bidiagonal matrix in order to decrease the number of mathematical processes. The proposed scheme is verified by numerical analysis.

We introduce a MIMO channel estimation method that exploits the channel's spatiotemporal correlation without the aid of a priori channel statistical information. A simplified Gauss-Markov model that has fewer parameters to be estimated is presented for the Kalman filter. In order to obtain statistical parameters on the time evolution of the channel, considering that the time evolution is a latent statistical variable, the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is applied for accurate estimation. Numerical simulations reveal that the proposed method is able to enhance estimation capability by exploiting spatiotemporal correlations, and the method works well even if the forgetting factor is small.

Dysarthric speech results from damage to the central nervous system involving the articulator, which can mainly be characterized by poor articulation due to irregular sub-glottal pressure, loudness bursts, phoneme elongation, and unexpected pauses during utterances. Since dysarthric speakers have physical disabilities due to the impairment of their nervous system, they cannot easily control electronic devices. For this reason, automatic speech recognition (ASR) can be a convenient interface for dysarthric speakers to control electronic devices. However, the performance of dysarthric ASR severely degrades when there is background noise. Thus, in this paper, we propose a noise reduction method that improves the performance of dysarthric ASR. The proposed method selectively applies either a Wiener filtering algorithm or a Kalman filtering algorithm according to the result of voiced or unvoiced classification. Then, the performance of the proposed method is compared to a conventional Wiener filtering method in terms of ASR accuracy.

Linear dynamical systems are basic state space models literally dealing with underlying system dynamics on the basis of linear state space equations. When the model is employed for time-series data analysis, the system identification, which detects the dimension of hidden state variables, is one of the most important tasks. Recently, it has been found that the model has singularities in the parameter space, which implies that analysis for adverse effects of the singularities is necessary for precise identification. However, the singularities in the models have not been thoroughly studied. There is a previous work, which dealt with the simplest case; the hidden state and the observation variables are both one dimensional. The present paper extends the setting to general dimensions and more rigorously reveals the structure of singularities. The results provide the asymptotic forms of the generalization error and the marginal likelihood, which are often used as criteria for the system identification.

Based on sample-pair refinement and local optimization, this paper proposes a high-accuracy and quick matting algorithm. First, in order to gather foreground/background samples effectively, we shoot rays in hybrid (gradient and uniform) directions. This strategy utilizes the prior knowledge to adjust the directions for effective searching. Second, we refine sample-pairs of pixels by taking into account neighbors'. Both high confidence sample-pairs and usable foreground/background components are utilized and thus more accurate and smoother matting results are achieved. Third, to reduce the computational cost of sample-pair selection in coarse matting, this paper proposes an adaptive sample clustering approach. Most redundant samples are eliminated adaptively, where the computational cost decreases significantly. Finally, we convert fine matting into a de-noising problem, which is optimized by minimizing the observation and state errors iteratively and locally. This leads to less space and time complexity compared with global optimization. Experiments demonstrate that we outperform other state-of-the-art methods in local matting both on accuracy and efficiency.

Rotate magnetic field can be used for ranging, especially the environment where electronic filed suffers a deep fading and attenuation, such as drilling underground. However, magnetic field is still affected by the ferromagnetic materials, e.g., oil casing pipe. The measurement error is not endurable for single measurement. In this paper, the Geometric Predicted Unscented Kalman Filtering (GP-UKF) algorithm is developed for rotate magnetic ranging system underground. With GP-UKF, the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) can be suppressed. It is really important in a long range detection by magnetic field, i.e., more than 50 meters.