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 trade-offs 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 iterated-corrector 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 iterated-corrector 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.