A process distribution approach for multisensor data fusion systems based on geographical dataspace partitioning

In this work, we present a new approach to distributed sensor data fusion (SDF) systems in multitarget tracking, called TSDF (Tessellated SDF), centered around a geographical partitioning (tessellation) of the data. A functional decomposition divides SDF into components that can be assigned to processing units, parallelizing the processing. The tessellation implicitly defines the set of tracks potentially yielding correlations with the sensor plots (observations) in a tile. Some tracks may occur as correlation candidates for multiple tiles. Conflicts caused by correlations of such tracks with plots in different tiles, are resolved by combining all involved tracks and plots into independent data association problems. The benefit of the TSDF approach to a clustering-based process distribution is independence of the problem space, which yields better scalability and manageability characteristics. The TSDF approach allows scaling in more than one way. It allows SDF for single sensor, multiple sensors on a single platform, and even for multiple sensors on multiple platforms. It also provides the flexibility to scale the processing to the size of the problem. This enables a better control of the throughput, to meet various timing constraints.