Distributed Flooding-then-Clustering: A Lazy Networking Approach for Distributed Multiple Target Tracking

We propose a straightforward but efficient networking approach to distributed multi-target tracking, which is free of ingenious target model design. We confront two challenges: One is from the lack of statistical knowledge about the target appearance/disappearance and movement, and about the sensors, e.g., the rates of clutter and misdetection; The other is from the severely limited computing and communication capability of the low-powered sensors, which may prevent them from running a full-fledged tracker/filter. To overcome these challenges, a flooding-then-clustering (FTC) approach is proposed which comprises two components: a distributed flooding scheme for iteratively sharing the measurements between sensors and a clustering-for-filtering approach for target detection and position estimation from the local aggregated measurements. We compare the FTC approach with cutting edge distributed probability hypothesis density (PHD) filters that are modeled with appropriate statistical knowledge about the target motion and the sensors. A series of simulation studies using either linear or nonlinear sensors, have been presented to verify the effectiveness of the FTC approach.