Obstacle tracking apparatus and method

摘要

An obstacle tracking apparatus includes an image input unit which acquires image sequences; an obstacle detector which detects candidate areas of an obstacle at a current time from the image sequences; a state hypothesis storage which stores a state hypothesis group including at least one state hypothesis of the obstacle at a previous time; an measurement hypothesis generator which generates a measurement hypothesis group including at least one measurement hypothesis obtained by combining measurement hypotheses for the respective positions of candidate areas of the obstacle and a measurement hypothesis in case the obstacle is not detected; a likelihood calculator which calculates likelihoods of respective combinations of the respective state hypotheses included in the state hypothesis group and the respective measurement hypotheses included in the measurement hypothesis group; a state hypothesis updater which obtains a highest likelihood from the likelihoods of the respective combinations and updates the state hypotheses at the previous time stored in the state hypothesis storage using the state hypothesis group at the current time as the state hypothesis group having the highest likelihood; and a hypothesis selector which selects the state hypothesis having the highest likelihood from the state hypothesis group at the current time as a state in which the obstacle is detected.