Computationally Efficient Distributed Multi-Sensor Fusion With Multi-Bernoulli Filter

This paper proposes a computationally efficient algorithm for distributed fusion in a sensor network in which multi-Bernoulli (MB) filters are locally running in every sensor node for multi-object tracking. The generalized Covariance Intersection (GCI) fusion rule is employed to fuse multiple MB random finite set densities. The fused density comprises a set of fusion hypotheses that grow exponentially with the number of Bernoulli components. Thus, GCI fusion with MB filters can become computationally intractable in practical applications that involve tracking of even a moderate number of objects. In order to accelerate the multi-sensor fusion procedure, we derive a theoretically sound approximation to the fused density. The number of fusion hypotheses in the resulting density is significantly smaller than the original fused density. It also has a parallelizable structure that allows multiple clusters of Bernoulli components to be fused independently. By carefully clustering Bernoulli components into isolated clusters using the GCI divergence as the distance metric, we propose an alternative to build exactly the approximated density without exhaustively computing all the fusion hypotheses. The combination of the proposed approximation technique and the fast clustering algorithm can enable a novel and fast GCI-MB fusion implementation. Our analysis shows that the proposed fusion method can dramatically reduce the computational and memory requirements with small bounded inline-formula>-error. The Gaussian mixture implementation of the proposed method is also presented. In various numerical experiments, including a challenging scenario with up to forty objects, the efficacy of the proposed fusion method is demonstrated.