An Extended Kalman Filter for Systems with Infinite-Dimensional Measurements

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Varley, Maxwell M., Molloy, Timothy L., Nair, Girish N.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Varley, Maxwell M.
Molloy, Timothy L.
Nair, Girish N.
author_facet Varley, Maxwell M.
Molloy, Timothy L.
Nair, Girish N.
contents This article examines state estimation in discrete-time nonlinear stochastic systems with finite-dimensional states and infinite-dimensional measurements, motivated by real-world applications such as vision-based localization and tracking. We develop an extended Kalman filter (EKF) for real-time state estimation, with the measurement noise modeled as an infinite-dimensional random field. When applied to vision-based state estimation, the measurement Jacobians required to implement the EKF are shown to correspond to image gradients. This result provides a novel system-theoretic justification for the use of image gradients as features for vision-based state estimation, contrasting with their (often heuristic) introduction in many computer-vision pipelines. We demonstrate the practical utility of the EKF on a public real-world dataset involving the localization of an aerial drone using video from a downward-facing monocular camera. The EKF is shown to outperform VINS-MONO, an established visual-inertial odometry algorithm, in some cases achieving mean squared error reductions of up to an order of magnitude.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_18749
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Extended Kalman Filter for Systems with Infinite-Dimensional Measurements
Varley, Maxwell M.
Molloy, Timothy L.
Nair, Girish N.
Systems and Control
Robotics
This article examines state estimation in discrete-time nonlinear stochastic systems with finite-dimensional states and infinite-dimensional measurements, motivated by real-world applications such as vision-based localization and tracking. We develop an extended Kalman filter (EKF) for real-time state estimation, with the measurement noise modeled as an infinite-dimensional random field. When applied to vision-based state estimation, the measurement Jacobians required to implement the EKF are shown to correspond to image gradients. This result provides a novel system-theoretic justification for the use of image gradients as features for vision-based state estimation, contrasting with their (often heuristic) introduction in many computer-vision pipelines. We demonstrate the practical utility of the EKF on a public real-world dataset involving the localization of an aerial drone using video from a downward-facing monocular camera. The EKF is shown to outperform VINS-MONO, an established visual-inertial odometry algorithm, in some cases achieving mean squared error reductions of up to an order of magnitude.
title An Extended Kalman Filter for Systems with Infinite-Dimensional Measurements
topic Systems and Control
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18749