Sensor management based on fisher information gain

Multi-sensor system is becoming increasingly important in a variety of military and civilian applications. In general, single sensor system can only provide partial information about environment while multi-sensor system provides a synergistic effect, which improves the quality and availability of information. Data fusion techniques can effectively combine this environmental information from similar and/or dissimilar sensors. Sensor management, aiming at improving data fusion performance by controlling sensor behavior, plays an important role in a data fusion process. This paper presents a method using fisher information gain based sensor effectiveness metric for sensor assignment in multi-sensor and multi-target tracking applications. The fisher information gain is computed for every sensor-target pairing on each scan. The advantage for this metric over other ones is that the fisher information gain for the target obtained by multi-sensors is equal to the sum of ones obtained by the individual sensor, so standard transportation problem formulation can be used to solve this problem without importing the concept of pseudo sensor. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the method.