Optimal Transport Based Filtering with Nonlinear State Equality Constraints

In this work we propose a framework to address the issue of state dependent nonlinear equality-constrained state estimation using Bayesian filtering. This framework is constructed specifically for a linear approximation of Bayesian filtering that uses the theory of Optimal Transport. As a part of this framework, we present three traditionally-used nonlinear equality constraint-preserving algorithms coupled with the Optimal Transport based filter: the equality-constrained Optimal Transport filter, the projected Optimal Transport filter, and the measurement-augmented Optimal Transport filter. In cases where the nonlinear equality-constraints represent an arbitrary convex manifold, we show that the re-sampling step of Optimal Transport filter, can generate initial samples for filtering, from any probability distribution function defined on this manifold. We show numerical results using our proposed framework.