Centralised Fusion of Cooperative Sensors With Limited Field of View for Multiple Resolvable Group Targets Tracking

Abstract

The coordinated deployment of multi-sensor systems significantly enhances group target detection capabilities, yet persistent tracking remains challenging due to inherent limitations in single-sensor field of view (FoV) coverage. This paper proposes a novel labelled multi-Bernoulli (LMB) filter for resolvable group target (RGT) tracking under the centralised fusion (CF) framework, abbreviated as the CF-LMB-RGT filter. The proposed method introduces the virtual leader kinematic model to capture intra-group motion constraints and incorporates group structure undirected graph into the LMB recursion for interaction prediction. A key innovation lies in the Kullback–Leibler divergence minimised fusion rule that optimally integrates local posteriors within joint FoV regions while explicitly modelling common FoV overlaps, enabling complementary information fusion across nonoverlapping sensor FoVs. Simulation results demonstrate that our method achieves impressive tracking accuracy for RGTs by integrating information from all sensors.