Multi-sensor PHD filtering with application to sensor management

The aim of multi-object filtering is to address the multiple target detection and/or tracking problem. This thesis focuses on the Probability Hypothesis Density (PHD) filter, a well-known tractable approximation of the Random Finite Set (RFS) filter when the observation process is realized by a single sensor. The first part proposes the rigorous construction of the exact multi-sensor PHD filter and its simplified expression, without approximation, through a joint partitioning of the target state space and the sensors. With this new method, the exact multi-sensor PHD can be propagated in simple surveillance scenarii. The second part deals with the sensor management problem in the PHD framework. At each iteration, the Balanced Explorer and Tracker (BET) builds a prediction of the posterior multi-sensor PHD thanks to the Predicted Ideal Measurement Set (PIMS) and produces a multi-sensor control according to a few simple operational principles adapted to surveillance activities