Use of the Gaussian inverse Wishart PHD (GIW-PHD) filter has demonstrated promise as an approach to track an unknown number of extended targets. However, the partitioning approaches used in the GIW-PHD filter, such as distance partition with sub-partition (DP-SP), prediction partition (PP) and expectation maximization partition (EMP), fails to provided accurate partition results when targets are spaced closely together and performing maneuvers. In order to improve the performance of a GIW-PHD filter, this paper presents a cooperation partitioning (CP) algorithm to solve the partitioning issue when targets are spaced closely together. In the GIW-PHD filter, the DP-SP is insensitive to target maneuvers but sensitive to the differences in target sizes, while EMP is the opposite. The proposed CP algorithm is a fusion approach of DP-SP and EMP, which employs EMP as a sub-partition approach after DP. Therefore, the CP algorithm will be sensitive to neither target maneuvers nor differences in target sizes. The simulation results show that the use of the proposed CP algorithm will improve the performance of the GIW-PHD filter when targets are spaced closely together.