Distributed Target Tracking in Challenging Environments Using Multiple Asynchronous Bearing-Only Sensors

In the multiple asynchronous bearing-only (BO) sensors tracking system, there usually exist two main challenges: (1) the presence of clutter measurements and the target misdetection due to imperfect sensing; (2) the out-of-sequence (OOS) arrival of locally transmitted information due to diverse sensor sampling interval or internal processing time or uncertain communication delay. This paper simultaneously addresses the two problems by proposing a novel distributed tracking architecture consisting of the local tracking and central fusion. To get rid of the kinematic state unobservability problem in local tracking for a single BO sensor scenario, we propose a novel local integrated probabilistic data association (LIPDA) method for target measurement state tracking. The proposed approach enables eliminating most of the clutter measurement disturbance with increased target measurement accuracy. In the central tracking, the fusion center uses the proposed distributed IPDA-forward prediction fusion and decorrelation (DIPDA-FPFD) approach to sequentially fuse the OOS information transmitted by each BO sensor. The track management is carried out at local sensor level and also at the fusion center by using the recursively calculated probability of target existence as a track quality measure. The efficiency of the proposed methodology was validated by intensive numerical experiments.