Multitarget Tracking with Spatial Nonmaximum Suppressed Sensor Selection

Multitarget tracking is one of the most important applications of sensor networks, yet it is an extremely challenging problem since multisensor multitarget tracking itself is nontrivial and the difficulty is further compounded by sensor management. Recently, random finite set based Bayesian framework has opened doors for multitarget tracking with sensor management, which is modelled in the framework of partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP). However, sensor management posed as a POMDP is in essence a combinatorial optimization problem which is NP-hard and computationally unacceptable. In this paper, we propose a novel sensor selection method for multitarget tracking. We first present the sequential multi-Bernoulli filter as a centralized multisensor fusion scheme for multitarget tracking. In order to perform sensor selection, we define the hypothesis information gain (HIG) of a sensor to measure its information quantity when the sensor is selected alone. Then, we propose spatial nonmaximum suppression approach to select sensors with respect to their locations and HIGs. Two distinguished implementations have been provided using the greedy spatial nonmaximum suppression. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of proposed sensor selection approach for multitarget tracking.