Adaptive foveal sensor for target tracking

We present a target tracker based on an adaptive foveal sensor; the tracker is implemented using particle filters. A foveal sensor’s field of view includes a highsensitivity “foveal" region surrounded by a lower sensitivity region. The location and acuity of the foveal region are adaptively adjusted, using the estimated target position and spread of particles. A Gaussian resampling method reduces the adverse effects of occasional large observation errors. Monte Carlo simulations show that this foveal sensor with adaptive acuity always outperforms a fixed acuity sensor; also, the particle filter (with a sufficient number of particles) outperforms previous Kalman filter-based implementations of the non-adaptive foveal sensor.