Cooperative multi-target tracking in passive sensor-based networks

Multiple targets tracking is a popular application with huge potentials in many practical areas, such as military air combat and civilian surveillance. Recent years, sensor networks, comprising of a large number of cheap, portable and tiny sensors, have attracted a lot of research interests in many disciplines. Alternative forms of sensors such as camera, can provide rich and vivid observation information. They have been widely applied into the environment monitoring or object suballiance. However, these devices are usually very expensive, especially, it becomes impractical to fulfill tasks cooperatively done within a group of such high cost devices. Recent work shows that despite the low information volume provided by the passive binary-detection based sensor, a group of such sensors can work together to achieve good target tracking performance. In this paper, we investigate a passive proximity binary sensor-based multiple target tracking system which can autonomically achieve the self-organized tracking capabilities without the intervention of human operators. The localization and tracking algorithm is achieve false alarm rates, robust under low detection probabilities and sensor ambiguity localization errors. Experimental results show promising performance in adopting this application in practice. © 2013 IEEE.