Efficient Sensor Management for Multitarget Tracking in Passive Sensor Networks via Cauchy-Schwarz Divergence

Abstract

This paper presents an efficient sensor management approach for multi-target tracking in passive sensor networks. Compared with active sensor networks, passive sensor networks have larger uncertainty due to the nature of passive sensing. Multi-target tracking in passive sensor networks is challenging because the multi-sensor multi-target fusion problem is difficult and sensor management is necessary to achieve good tradeoffs between tracking accuracy and energy consumption or other costs. To address this problem, we present an efficient information-theoretic approach to manage the sensors for better tracking of the unknown and time-varying number of targets. This is accomplished with two main technical innovations. The first is a tractable information-based multi-sensor selection solution via a partially observed Markov decision process framework. The Cauchy-Schwarz divergence is used as the criterion to select informative sensors sequentially from the candidates. The second is a novel dual-stage fusion strategy based on the iteratedcorrector multi-sensor generalized labeled multi-Bernoulli filter. Since the performance of the iterated-corrector scheme is greatly influenced by the order of sensor updates, the selected sensors are first ranked in order of their abilities to detect targets according to the Cauchy-Schwarz divergence, followed the iteratedcorrector update. The computation costs of ranking the sensors are negligible, since the Cauchy-Schwarz divergence has been computed in the multi-sensor selection procedure. Simulation results validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.