Sensor Selection for Active Information Fusion

Active information fusion is to selectively choose the sensors so that the information gain can compensate the cost spent in information gathering. However, determining the most informative and cost-effective sensors requires an evaluation of all possible sensor combinations, which is computationally intractable, particularly, when information-theoretic criterion is used. This paper presents a methodology to actively select a sensor subset with the best tradeoff between information gain and sensor cost by exploiting the synergy among sensors. Our approach includes two aspects: a method for efficient mutual information computation and a graph-theoretic approach to reduce search space. The approach can reduce the time complexity significantly in searching for a near optimal sensor subset.