Autonomous systems such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) need to be able to recognise and track crowds of people, e.g. for rescuing and surveillance purposes. Large groups generate multiple measurements with uncertain origin. Additionally, often the sensor noise characteristics are unknown but measurements are bounded within certain intervals. In this work we propose two solutions to the crowds tracking problem with a box particle filtering approach and with a convolution particle filtering approach. The developed filters can cope with the measurement origin uncertainty in an elegant way, i.e. resolve the data association problem. For the box particle filter (PF) we derive a theoretical expression of the generalised likelihood function in the presence of clutter. An adaptive convolution particle filter (CPF) is also developed and the performance of the two filters is compared with the standard sequential importance resampling (SIR) PF. The pros and cons of the two filters are illustrated over a realistic scenario (representing a crowd motion in a stadium) for a large crowd of pedestrians. Accurate estimation results are achieved. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.