14,968 research outputs found
Distributed Object Tracking Using a Cluster-Based Kalman Filter in Wireless Camera Networks
Local data aggregation is an effective means to save sensor node energy and prolong the lifespan of wireless sensor networks. However, when a sensor network is used to track moving objects, the task of local data aggregation in the network presents a new set of challenges, such as the necessity to estimate, usually in real time, the constantly changing state of the target based on information acquired by the nodes at different time instants. To address these issues, we propose a distributed object tracking system which employs a cluster-based Kalman filter in a network of wireless cameras. When a target is detected, cameras that can observe the same target interact with one another to form a cluster and elect a cluster head. Local measurements of the target acquired by members of the cluster are sent to the cluster head, which then estimates the target position via Kalman filtering and periodically transmits this information to a base station. The underlying clustering protocol allows the current state and uncertainty of the target position to be easily handed off among clusters as the object is being tracked. This allows Kalman filter-based object tracking to be carried out in a distributed manner. An extended Kalman filter is necessary since measurements acquired by the cameras are related to the actual position of the target by nonlinear transformations. In addition, in order to take into consideration the time uncertainty in the measurements acquired by the different cameras, it is necessary to introduce nonlinearity in the system dynamics. Our object tracking protocol requires the transmission of significantly fewer messages than a centralized tracker that naively transmits all of the local measurements to the base station. It is also more accurate than a decentralized tracker that employs linear interpolation for local data aggregation. Besides, the protocol is able to perform real-time estimation because our implementation takes into consideration the sparsit- - y of the matrices involved in the problem. The experimental results show that our distributed object tracking protocol is able to achieve tracking accuracy comparable to the centralized tracking method, while requiring a significantly smaller number of message transmissions in the network
Gossip and Distributed Kalman Filtering: Weak Consensus under Weak Detectability
The paper presents the gossip interactive Kalman filter (GIKF) for
distributed Kalman filtering for networked systems and sensor networks, where
inter-sensor communication and observations occur at the same time-scale. The
communication among sensors is random; each sensor occasionally exchanges its
filtering state information with a neighbor depending on the availability of
the appropriate network link. We show that under a weak distributed
detectability condition:
1. the GIKF error process remains stochastically bounded, irrespective of the
instability properties of the random process dynamics; and
2. the network achieves \emph{weak consensus}, i.e., the conditional
estimation error covariance at a (uniformly) randomly selected sensor converges
in distribution to a unique invariant measure on the space of positive
semi-definite matrices (independent of the initial state.)
To prove these results, we interpret the filtered states (estimates and error
covariances) at each node in the GIKF as stochastic particles with local
interactions. We analyze the asymptotic properties of the error process by
studying as a random dynamical system the associated switched (random) Riccati
equation, the switching being dictated by a non-stationary Markov chain on the
network graph.Comment: Submitted to the IEEE Transactions, 30 pages
A Deep-structured Conditional Random Field Model for Object Silhouette Tracking
In this work, we introduce a deep-structured conditional random field
(DS-CRF) model for the purpose of state-based object silhouette tracking. The
proposed DS-CRF model consists of a series of state layers, where each state
layer spatially characterizes the object silhouette at a particular point in
time. The interactions between adjacent state layers are established by
inter-layer connectivity dynamically determined based on inter-frame optical
flow. By incorporate both spatial and temporal context in a dynamic fashion
within such a deep-structured probabilistic graphical model, the proposed
DS-CRF model allows us to develop a framework that can accurately and
efficiently track object silhouettes that can change greatly over time, as well
as under different situations such as occlusion and multiple targets within the
scene. Experiment results using video surveillance datasets containing
different scenarios such as occlusion and multiple targets showed that the
proposed DS-CRF approach provides strong object silhouette tracking performance
when compared to baseline methods such as mean-shift tracking, as well as
state-of-the-art methods such as context tracking and boosted particle
filtering.Comment: 17 page
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