Information Fusion of Passive Sensors for Detection of Moving Targets in Dynamic Environments

This paper addresses the problem of target detection in dynamic environments in a semi-supervised data-driven setting with low-cost passive sensors. A key challenge here is to simultaneously achieve high probabilities of correct detection with low probabilities of false alarm under the constraints of limited computation and communication resources. In general, the changes in a dynamic environment may significantly affect the performance of target detection due to limited training scenarios and the assumptions made on signal behavior under a static environment. To this end, an algorithm of binary hypothesis testing is proposed based on clustering of features extracted from multiple sensors that may observe the target. First, the features are extracted individually from time-series signals of different sensors by using a recently reported feature extraction tool, called symbolic dynamic filtering. Then, these features are grouped as clusters in the feature space to evaluate homogeneity of the sensor responses. Finally, a decision for target detection is made based on the distance measurements between pairs of sensor clusters. The proposed procedure has been experimentally validated in a laboratory setting for mobile target detection. In the experiments, multiple homogeneous infrared sensors have been used with different orientations in the presence of changing ambient illumination intensities. The experimental results show that the proposed target detection procedure with feature-level sensor fusion is robust and that it outperforms those with decision-level and data-level sensor fusion.