Information Consensus for Distributed Multi-target Tracking

Due to their high fault-tolerance, ease of installation and scalability to large networks, distributed algorithms have recently gained immense popularity in the sensor networks community, especially in computer vision. Multi-target tracking in a camera network is one of the fundamental problems in this domain. Distributed estimation algorithms work by exchanging information between sensors that are communication neighbors. Since most cameras are directional sensors, it is often the case that neighboring sensors may not be sensing the same target. Such sensors that do not have information about a target are termed as ``naive'' with respect to that target. In this paper, we propose consensus-based distributed multi-target tracking algorithms in a camera network that are designed to address this issue of naivety. The estimation errors in tracking and data association, as well as the effect of naivety, are jointly addressed leading to the development of an information-weighted consensus algorithm, which we term as the Multi-target Information Consensus (MTIC) algorithm. The incorporation of the probabilistic data association mechanism makes the MTIC algorithm very robust to false measurements/clutter. Experimental analysis is provided to support the theoretical results.