A priori knowledge of target detection probability is of critical importance in the Gaussian mixture probability hypothesis density (PHD) and cardinalized PHD (CPHD) filters. In addition, these two filters require that the process noise and measurement noise of the state propagated in the recursion be Gaussian. These limitations may restrict the two filters' application in real problems. To accommodate unknown target detection probability and nonnegative non-Gaussian parameters, this paper proposes a new implementation based on inverse gamma Gaussian mixtures, introducing a location independent feature whose posterior probability density and likelihood function are nonnegative non-Gaussian inverse gamma and gamma functions to determine detection probability incorporated into the recursions. The derivation of the merging inverse gamma components is also presented to prevent the unbounded increase of mixture components by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence. First, a real heavy-clutter scenario is used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed filters in track initiation and target tracking without known detection probability. Then, simulations are presented to demonstrate that the proposed CPHD and PHD filters can achieve multitarget tracking performance similar to the standard counterparts with known target detection probability, and that they outperform the standard counterparts in scenarios with unknown and dynamically changing detection probability. The robustness of the proposed filters is tested in both real and simulation scenarios. It is also shown that the analytical and empirical computational complexities of the proposed filters are similar to those of their standard counterparts. Response: They have been cited, and we have discussed them in the introduction in page 1 line 65-78.

In the field of intelligent transportation systems, pedestrian detection has become a problem that is urgently in need of a solution. Effective pedestrian detection reduces accidents and protects pedestrians from injuries. A pedestrian-detection algorithm, namely, single template matching with kernel density estimation clustering (STM-KDE), is proposed in this paper. First, the KDE-based clustering method is utilized to extract candidate pedestrians in point clouds. Next, the coordinates of the point clouds are transformed into the pedestrians’ local coordinate system and projection images are generated. Locally adaptive regression kernel features are extracted from the projection image and matched with the template features by using cosine similarity, based on which pedestrians are distinguished from other columnar objects. Finally, comparative experiments using KITTI datasets are conducted to verify pedestrian-detection performance. Compared with the STM with radially bounded nearest neighbor (STM-RBNN) algorithm and the KDE-based pedestrian-detection algorithm, the proposed algorithm can segment gathering pedestrians and distinguish them from other columnar objects in real scenarios.

LiDAR-based pedestrian detection and tracking (PDT) with high-resolution sensing capability plays an important role in real-world applications such as security monitoring, human behavior analysis, and intelligent transportation. The problem of LiDAR-based PDT suffers from the complex gathering movements and the phenomenon of self- and inter-object occlusions. In this paper, the detection and tracking of dense pedestrians using three-dimensional (3D) real-measured LiDAR point clouds in surveillance applications is studied. To deal with the problem of undersegmentation of dense pedestrian point clouds, the kernel density estimation (KDE) is used for pedestrians center estimation which further leads to a pedestrian segmentation method. Three novel features are defined and used for further PDT performance improvements, which takes advantage of the pedestrians’ posture and body proportion. Finally, a new track management strategy for dense pedestrians is presented to deal with the tracking instability caused by dense pedestrians occlusion. The performance of the proposed method is validated with experiments on the KITTI dataset. The experiment shows that the proposed method can significantly increase F1 score from 0.5122 to 0.7829 compared with the STM-KDE. In addition, compared with AB3DMOT and EagerMOT, the tracking trajectories from the proposed method have the longest average survival time of 36.17 frames.

Lidar has received a lot of attention due to its precise ranging accuracy. Ground points filtering is an important task in point clouds processing. It's a challenge to model the ground surface and filter the point clouds accurately in the case of complex ground undulations, occlusions, and sparse point clouds. A novel ground surface modeling method based on a hybrid regression technique is proposed in this paper. The method integrates Gaussian process regression (GPR) and robust locally weighted regression (RLWR) by dividing the point clouds that are projected on the polar grid map into radial and circumferential filtering processes to form a hybrid regression model, which has the ability to eliminate the influence of outliers and model the ground surface robustly. First, the RLWR combined with gradient filter is applied to fit the sampled points in the radial direction, which will exclude outliers and get the fitting ground line. All radial fitting lines constitute the seed skeleton of the whole plane. Then, based on the seeds in the same circumferential of the skeleton, the GPR is applied to construct the ground surface model. The comparative experiments are implemented quantitatively and qualitatively on the simulated point clouds and measured data. The results show that the proposed method performs well in most real scenarios, even in the cases of ground undulation, occlusion, and sparse point clouds.

To significantly enhance the performance of point cloud semantic segmentation, this manuscript presents a novel method for constructing large-scale networks and offers an effective lightweighting technique. First, a latent point feature processing (LPFP) module is utilized to interconnect base networks such as PointNet++ and Point Transformer. This intermediate module serves both as a feature information transfer and a ground truth supervision function. Furthermore, in order to alleviate the increase in computational costs brought by constructing large-scale networks and better adapt to the demand for terminal deployment, a novel point cloud lightweighting method for semantic segmentation network (PCLN) is proposed to compress the network by transferring multidimensional feature information of large-scale networks. Specifically, at different stages of the large-scale network, the structure and attention information of the point features are selectively transferred to guide the compressed network to train in the direction of the large-scale network. This paper also solves the problem of representing global structure information of large-scale point clouds through feature sampling and aggregation. Extensive experiments on public datasets and real-world data demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly improve the performance of different base networks and outperform the state-of-the-art.

A novel fusion-based ship detection method from polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (Pol-SAR) images is proposed in this paper. After feature extraction and constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detection, the detection results of HH channel, diplane scattering by Pauli decomposition and helical factor by Barnes decomposition are fused together. The confirmed targets and potential target pixels can be obtained after the fusion process. Using the difference degree of the target, potential target pixels can be classified. The fusion-based ship detection method works accurately by utilizing three different features comprehensively. The result of applying the technique to measured Airborne Synthetic Radar (AIRSAR) data shows that the novel detection method can achieve better performance in both ship’s detection and ship’s shape preservation compared to the result of K-means clustering method and the Notch Filter method.