Collaborative Signal and Information Processing: An Information Directed Approach

This article describes information-based approaches to processing and organizing spatially distributed, multi-modal sensor data in a sensor network. Energy constrained networked sensing systems must rely on collaborative signal and information processing (CSIP) to dynamically allocate resources, maintain multiple sensing foci, and attend to new stimuli of interest, all based on task requirements and resource constraints. Target tracking is an essential capability for sensor networks and is used as a canonical problem for studying information organization problems in CSIP. After formulating a CSIP tracking problem in a distributed constrained optimization framework, the paper describes IDSQ and other techniques for tracking individual targets as well as combinatorial tracking problems such as counting targets. Results from simulations and experimental implementations have demonstrated that these information based approaches are scalable and make efficient use of scarce sensing and communication resources. Keywords— Sensor networks, distributed sensing, collaborative signal and information processing, information utility, constrained optimization, target tracking. Category: Collaborative Signal Information processing, Target Classification and Tracking I. Sensor Network Applications, Constraints,