Hyperbolic‐singular‐value‐decomposition‐based square‐root accurate continuous‐discrete extended‐unscented Kalman filters for estimating continuous‐time stochastic models with discrete measurements

Summary This paper presents novel square‐root accurate continuous‐discrete extended‐unscented Kalman filtering (ACD‐EUKF) algorithms for treating continuous‐time stochastic systems with discrete measurements. The time updates in such methods are fulfilled as those in the extended Kalman filter whereas their measurement updates are copied from the unscented Kalman filter. All this allows accurate predictions of the state mean and covariance to be combined with accurate measurement updates. The main weakness of this technique is the need for the Cholesky decomposition of predicted covariances derived in time‐update steps. Such a factorization is highly sensitive to numerical integration and round‐off errors committed, which may result in losing the covariance's positivity and, hence, failing the Cholesky decomposition. The latter problem is usually solved in the form of square‐root filtering implementations, which propagate not the covariance matrix but its square root instead. Here, we devise square‐root ACD‐EUKF methods grounded in the singular value decomposition (SVD). The SVD rooted in orthogonal transforms is applicable to any ACD‐EUKF with nonnegative weights, whereas the remaining ones, which can enjoy negative weights as well, are treated by means of the hyperbolic SVD based on J ‐orthogonal transforms. The filters constructed are presented in a concise algorithmic form, which is convenient for practical use. Their two particular versions grounded in the classical and cubature unscented Kalman filtering parameterizations are examined in severe conditions of tackling a radar tracking problem, where an aircraft executes a coordinated turn. These are also compared to their non‐square‐root predecessor and other methods within the target tracking scenario with ill‐conditioned measurements.