Track-to-Track Association for Collective Perception based on Stochastic Optimization

Abstract: Collective perception is a key aspect for autonomous driving in smart cities as it aims to combine the local environment models of multiple intelligent vehicles in order to overcome sensor limitations. A crucial part of multi-sensor fusion is track-to-track association. Previous works often suffer from high computational complexity or are based on heuristics. We propose an association algorithms based on stochastic optimization, which leverages a multidimensional likelihood incorporating the number of tracks and their spatial distribution and furthermore computes several association hypotheses. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in Monte Carlo simulations and a realistic collective perception scenario computing high-likelihood associations in ambiguous settings.