A Parallel Implementation of Hypothesis-Oriented Multiple Hypothesis Tracking

Hypothesis-oriented Multiple Hypothesis Tracking (HOMHT) recursively generates hypotheses on the origins of measurements and manages them, therefore it is computationally intensive. To speed up HOMHT for tracking hundreds of targets in real time, we propose a parallel implementation of this algorithm which distributes hypotheses into independent worker threads residing in multiple CPU cores. The implementation in this paper is based on object-oriented programming: each hypothesis object manages its target data all by itself and the generation and pruning of a hypothesis is achieved by its copy constructor and destructor functions. We evaluate this method by tracking 150 targets through 3 heterogeneous sensors in real-time with 32-best hypotheses running in 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 worker threads respectively. The results validate the method's scalability in which measurement fusion latency is approximately inversely proportional to worker thread count. We also make a pressure test by tracking 500 targets through 3 sensors, and HOMHT is able to run concurrently in real-time with 32 worker threads.