  Directional estimation is a common problem in many tracking applications.
Traditional filters such as the Kalman filter perform poorly because they fail
to take the periodic nature of the problem into account. We present a recursive
filter for directional data based on the Bingham distribution in two
dimensions. The proposed filter can be applied to circular filtering problems
with 180 degree symmetry, i.e., rotations by 180 degrees cannot be
distinguished. It is easily implemented using standard numerical techniques and
suitable for real-time applications. The presented approach is extensible to
quaternions, which allow tracking arbitrary three-dimensional orientations. We
evaluate our filter in a challenging scenario and compare it to a traditional
Kalman filtering approach.
