Maximum correntropy-based pseudolinear Kalman filter for passive bearings-only target tracking

This paper proposes a new approach for solving the bearings-only target tracking (BoT) problem by introducing a maximum correntropy criterion to the pseudolinear Kalman filter (PLKF). PLKF has been a popular choice for solving BoT problems owing to the reduced computational complexity. However, the coupling between the measurement vector and pseudolinear noise causes bias in PLKF. To address this issue, a bias-compensated PLKF (BC-PLKF) under the assumption of Gaussian noise was formulated. However, this assumption may not be valid in most practical cases. Therefore, a bias-compensated PLKF with maximum correntropy criterion is introduced, resulting in two new filters: maximum correntropy pseudolinear Kalman filter (MC-PLKF) and maximum correntropy bias-compensated pseudolinear Kalman filter (MC-BC-PLKF). To demonstrate the performance of the proposed estimators, a comparative analysis assuming large outliers in the process and measurement model of 2D BoT is conducted. These large outliers are modeled as non-Gaussian noises with diverse noise distributions that combine Gaussian and Laplacian noises. The simulation results are validated using root mean square error (RMSE), average RMSE (ARMSE), percentage of track loss and bias norm. Compared to PLKF and BC-PLKF, all the proposed maximum correntropy-based filters (MC-PLKF and MC-BC-PLKF) performed with superior estimation accuracy.