As a typical implementation of the probability hypothesis density (PHD) filter, sequential Monte Carlo PHD (SMC-PHD) is widely employed in highly nonlinear systems. However, diversity loss of particles introduced by the resampling step, which can be called particle impoverishment problem,
may lead to performance degradation and restrain the use of SMC-PHD filter in practical applications. In this paper, a novel SMC-PHD filter based on particle compensation is proposed to solve the problem. Firstly, based on an analysis of the particle impoverishment problem, a new particle
compensatory method is developed to improve the particle diversity. Then, all the particles are integrated into the SMC-PHD filter framework. Compared with the SMC-PHD filter, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed particle compensatory SMC-PHD filter is capable of overcoming the
particle impoverishment problem, which indicate good application prospects.