Partial Consensus and Conservative Fusion of Gaussian Mixtures for Distributed PHD Fusion

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new partial consensus method for distributed GM-PHD fusion that improves efficiency and robustness by sharing only significant Gaussian components, with two conservative fusion schemes and demonstrated superior tracking performance.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel partial consensus approach for distributed GM-PHD fusion, reducing communication and false data impact, with two conservative mixture reduction schemes and improved tracking results.

Findings

Partial consensus improves communication efficiency.

Conservative fusion schemes effectively reduce false data influence.

Proposed methods outperform generalized covariance intersection in simulations.

Abstract

We propose a novel consensus notion, called "partial consensus", for distributed GM-PHD (Gaussian mixture probability hypothesis density) fusion based on a peer-to-peer (P2P) sensor network, in which only highly-weighted posterior Gaussian components (GCs) are disseminated in the P2P communication for fusion while the insignificant GCs are not involved. The partial consensus does not only enjoy high efficiency in both network communication and local fusion computation, but also significantly reduces the affect of potential false data (clutter) to the filter, leading to increased signal-to-noise ratio at local sensors. Two "conservative" mixture reduction schemes are advocated for fusing the shared GCs in a fully distributed manner. One is given by pairwise averaging GCs between sensors based on Hungarian assignment and the other is merging close GCs based a new GM merging scheme. The proposed approaches have a close connection to the conservative fusion approaches known as covariance union and arithmetic mean density. In parallel, average consensus is sought on the cardinality distribution (namely the GM weight sum) among sensors. Simulations for tracking either a single target or multiple targets that simultaneously appear are presented based on a sensor network where each sensor operates a GM-PHD filter, in order to compare our approaches with the benchmark generalized covariance intersection approach. The results demonstrate that the partial, arithmetic average, consensus outperforms the complete, geometric average, consensus.