Kalman-and-Bayesian-Filters-in-Python

Kalman and Bayesian Filters in Python Introductory text for Kalman and Bayesian filters. All code is written in Python, and the book itself is written using Jupyter Notebook so that you can run and modify the code in your browser. What better way to learn? "Kalman and Bayesian Filters in Python" looks amazing! ... your book is just what I needed - Allen Downey, Professor and O'Reilly author. Thanks for all your work on publishing your introductory text on Kalman Filtering, as well as the Python Kalman Filtering libraries. We’ve been using it internally to teach some key state estimation concepts to folks and it’s been a huge help. - Sam Rodkey, SpaceX Start reading online now by clicking the binder or Azure badge below: What are Kalman and Bayesian Filters? Sensors are noisy. The world is full of data and events that we want to measure and track, but we cannot rely on sensors to give us perfect information. The GPS in my car reports altitude. Each time I pass the same point in the road it reports a slightly different altitude. My kitchen scale gives me different readings if I weigh the same object twice. In simple cases the solution is obvious. If my scale gives slightly different readings I can just take a few readings and average them. Or I can replace it with a more accurate scale. But what do we do when the sensor is very noisy, or the environment makes data collection difficult? We may be trying to track the movement of a low flying aircraft. We may want to create an autopilot for a drone, or ensure that our farm tractor seeded the entire field. I work on computer vision, and I need to track moving objects in images, and the computer vision algorithms create very noisy and unreliable results. This book teaches you how to solve these sorts of filtering problems. I use many different algorithms, but they are all based on Bayesian probability. In simple terms Bayesian probability determines what is likely to be true based on past information. If I asked you the heading of my car at this moment you would have no idea. You'd prefer a number between 1° and 360° degrees, and have a 1 in 360 chance of being right. Now suppose I told you that 2 seconds ago its heading was 243°. In 2 seconds my car could not turn very far, so you could make a far more accurate prediction. You are using past information to more accurately infer information about the present or future. The world is also noisy. That prediction helps you make a better estimate, but it also subject to noise. I may have just braked for a dog or swerved around a pothole. Strong winds and ice on the road are external influences on the path of my car. In control literature we call this noise though you may not think of it that way. There is more to Bayesian probability, but you have the main idea. Knowledge is uncertain, and we alter our beliefs based on the strength of the evidence. Kalman and Bayesian filters blend our noisy and limited knowledge of how a system behaves with the noisy and limited sensor readings to produce the best possible estimate of the state of the system. Our principle is to never discard information. Say we are tracking an object and a sensor reports that it suddenly changed direction. Did it really turn, or is the data noisy? It depends. If this is a jet fighter we'd be very inclined to believe the report of a sudden maneuver. If it is a freight train on a straight track we would discount it. We'd further modify our belief depending on how accurate the sensor is. Our beliefs depend on the past and on our knowledge of the system we are tracking and on the characteristics of the sensors. The Kalman filter was invented by Rudolf Emil Kálmán to solve this sort of problem in a mathematically optimal way. Its first use was on the Apollo missions to the moon, and since then it has been used in an enormous variety of domains. There are Kalman filters in aircraft, on submarines, and on cruise missiles. Wall street uses them to track the market. They are used in robots, in IoT (Internet of Things) sensors, and in laboratory instruments. Chemical plants use them to control and monitor reactions. They are used to perform medical imaging and to remove noise from cardiac signals. If it involves a sensor and/or time-series data, a Kalman filter or a close relative to the Kalman filter is usually involved. Motivation The motivation for this book came out of my desire for a gentle introduction to Kalman filtering. I'm a software engineer that spent almost two decades in the avionics field, and so I have always been 'bumping elbows' with the Kalman filter, but never implemented one myself. As I moved into solving tracking problems with computer vision the need became urgent. There are classic textbooks in the field, such as Grewal and Andrew's excellent Kalman Filtering. But sitting down and trying to read many of these books is a dismal experience if you do not have the required background. Typically the first few chapters fly through several years of undergraduate math, blithely referring you to textbooks on topics such as Itō calculus, and present an entire semester's worth of statistics in a few brief paragraphs. They are good texts for an upper undergraduate course, and an invaluable reference to researchers and professionals, but the going is truly difficult for the more casual reader. Symbology is introduced without explanation, different texts use different terms and variables for the same concept, and the books are almost devoid of examples or worked problems. I often found myself able to parse the words and comprehend the mathematics of a definition, but had no idea as to what real world phenomena they describe. "But what does that mean?" was my repeated thought. However, as I began to finally understand the Kalman filter I realized the underlying concepts are quite straightforward. A few simple probability rules, some intuition about how we integrate disparate knowledge to explain events in our everyday life and t