Distributed Scalable Multi-Target Tracking with a Wireless Sensor Network

We propose a novel technique for tracking multiple co-dependently maneuvering targets using a wireless sensor network. We consider the scenario where the targets carry radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and the sensors in the network measure some metric of the radio transmissions from these tags, like the received signal strength, the time of arrival or the angle of arrival. These measurements are then processed by a sampling importance re-sampling particle filter for tracking. While such a set-up is now fairly standard in literature, the novel aspect of our algorithm is that it exploits the co-dependencies in the motion of the targets via a fully distributed and tractable particle filter bank. We thereby extract a significant "diversity gain", while allowing the network to scale seamlessly to a large tracking region. In particular, we avoid the pitfalls of network congestion and severely shortened battery lifetimes that plague currently used procedures that implement the filter on the joint multi-target probability density.