Open Source Tracking and Estimation Working Group

As any researcher or practitioner knows, it is currently difficult and time consuming to recreate state-of-the-art tracking and state estimation algorithms to benchmark one’s own work. Comparison of new algorithms with existing solutions involves recoding the alternative algorithms from the academic literature. Industrial users of algorithms also find it difficult to assess which algorithms meet requirements objectively and exhaustively rather than driven by intuition or personal favourites.

The Open Source Tracking and Estimation Working Group (OSTEWG) exists to solve these problems for the tracking and state estimation community. Based around the Stone Soup project, this ISIF Working Group will form a community focussed on development of an open-source tracking and state estimation framework and populate the framework with open-source components.

This will provide a flexible and unified software platform for researchers and engineers to develop, test and benchmark a variety of existing multi-sensor and multi-object estimation algorithms. It will also allow rapid prototyping of new algorithms in high-level languages, both open and proprietary (e.g. Python, Matlab), as well as development in compiled languages (e.g. C++), by providing a set of libraries which implement the necessary functions for tracking and state estimation.