Localisation of mobile nodes in wireless networks with correlated in time measurement noise.

Wireless sensor networks are an inherent part of decision making, object tracking and location awareness systems. This work is focused on simultaneous localisation of mobile nodes based on received signal strength indicators (RSSIs) with correlated in time measurement noises. Two approaches to deal with the correlated measurement noises are proposed in the framework of auxiliary particle filtering: with a noise augmented state vector and the second approach implements noise decorrelation. The performance of the two proposed multi model auxiliary particle filters (MM AUX-PFs) is validated over simulated and real RSSIs and high localisation accuracy is demonstrated

Decorrelation of Neutral Vector Variables: Theory and Applications

In this paper, we propose novel strategies for neutral vector variable decorrelation. Two fundamental invertible transformations, namely serial nonlinear transformation and parallel nonlinear transformation, are proposed to carry out the decorrelation. For a neutral vector variable, which is not multivariate Gaussian distributed, the conventional principal component analysis (PCA) cannot yield mutually independent scalar variables. With the two proposed transformations, a highly negatively correlated neutral vector can be transformed to a set of mutually independent scalar variables with the same degrees of freedom. We also evaluate the decorrelation performances for the vectors generated from a single Dirichlet distribution and a mixture of Dirichlet distributions. The mutual independence is verified with the distance correlation measurement. The advantages of the proposed decorrelation strategies are intensively studied and demonstrated with synthesized data and practical application evaluations

Sequential Markov Chain Monte Carlo for multi-target tracking with correlated RSS measurements

In this paper, we present a Bayesian approach to accurately track multiple objects based on Received Signal Strength (RSS) measurements. This work shows that taking into account the spatial correlations of the observations caused by the random shadowing effect can induce significant tracking performance improvements, especially in very noisy scenarios. Additionally, the superiority of the proposed Sequential Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SMCMC) method over the more common Sequential Importance Resampling (SIR) technique is empirically demonstrated through numerical simulations in which multiple targets have to be tracked

Gradient based sequential Markov chain Monte Carlo for multitarget tracking with correlated measurements

Measurements in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are often correlated both in space and in time. This paper focuses on tracking multiple targets in WSNs by taking into consideration these measurement correlations. A sequential Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SMCMC) approach is proposed in which a Metropolis within Gibbs refinement step and a likelihood gradient proposal are introduced. This SMCMC filter is applied to case studies with cellular network received signal strength data in which the shadowing component correlations in space and time are estimated. The efficiency of the SMCMC approach compared to particle filtering, as well as the gradient proposal compared to a basic prior proposal, are demonstrated through numerical simulations. The accuracy improvement with the gradient-based SMCMC is above 90% when using a low number of particles. Thanks to its sequential nature, the proposed approach can be applied to various WSN applications, including traffic mobility monitoring and prediction

Decorrelation of Neutral Vector Variables: Theory and Applications

In this paper, we propose novel strategies for neutral vector variable decorrelation. Two fundamental invertible transformations, namely, serial nonlinear transformation and parallel nonlinear transformation, are proposed to carry out the decorrelation. For a neutral vector variable, which is not multivariate-Gaussian distributed, the conventional principal component analysis cannot yield mutually independent scalar variables. With the two proposed transformations, a highly negatively correlated neutral vector can be transformed to a set of mutually independent scalar variables with the same degrees of freedom. We also evaluate the decorrelation performances for the vectors generated from a single Dirichlet distribution and a mixture of Dirichlet distributions. The mutual independence is verified with the distance correlation measurement. The advantages of the proposed decorrelation strategies are intensively studied and demonstrated with synthesized data and practical application evaluations

Innovative Techniques for the Retrieval of Earth’s Surface and Atmosphere Geophysical Parameters: Spaceborne Infrared/Microwave Combined Analyses

With the advent of the first satellites for Earth Observation: Landsat-1 in July 1972 and ERS-1 in May 1991, the discipline of environmental remote sensing has become, over time, increasingly fundamental for the study of phenomena characterizing the planet Earth. The goal of environmental remote sensing is to perform detailed analyses and to monitor the temporal evolution of different physical phenomena, exploiting the mechanisms of interaction between the objects that are present in an observed scene and the electromagnetic radiation detected by sensors, placed at a distance from the scene, operating at different frequencies. The analyzed physical phenomena are those related to climate change, weather forecasts, global ocean circulation, greenhouse gas profiling, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, soil subsidence, and the effects of rapid urbanization processes. Generally, remote sensing sensors are of two primary types: active and passive. Active sensors use their own source of electromagnetic radiation to illuminate and analyze an area of interest. An active sensor emits radiation in the direction of the area to be investigated and then detects and measures the radiation that is backscattered from the objects contained in that area. Passive sensors, on the other hand, detect natural electromagnetic radiation (e.g., from the Sun in the visible band and the Earth in the infrared and microwave bands) emitted or reflected by the object contained in the observed scene. The scientific community has dedicated many resources to developing techniques to estimate, study and analyze Earth’s geophysical parameters. These techniques differ for active and passive sensors because they depend strictly on the type of the measured physical quantity. In my P.h.D. work, inversion techniques for estimating Earth’s surface and atmosphere geophysical parameters will be addressed, emphasizing methods based on machine learning (ML). In particular, the study of cloud microphysics and the characterization of Earth’s surface changes phenomenon are the critical points of this work

Tracking with Sparse and Correlated Measurements via a Shrinkage-based Particle Filter

This paper presents a shrinkage-based particle filter method for tracking a mobile user in wireless networks. The proposed method estimates the shadowing noise covariance matrix using the shrinkage technique. The particle filter is designed with the estimated covariance matrix to improve the tracking performance. The shrinkage-based particle filter can be applied in a number of applications for navigation, tracking and localization when the available sensor measurements are correlated and sparse. The performance of the shrinkage-based particle filter is compared with the posterior Cramer-Rao lower bound, which is also derived in the paper. The advantages of the proposed shrinkage-based particle filter approach are demonstrated via simulation and experimental results