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

We propose a novel consensus notion, called “partial consensus,” for distributed Gaussian mixture probability hypothesis density fusion based on a decentralized sensor network, in which only highly weighted Gaussian components (GCs) are exchanged and fused across neighbor sensors. It is shown that this not only gains high efficiency in both network communication and fusion computation, but also significantly compensates the effects of clutter and missed detections. Two “conservative” mixture reduction schemes are devised for refining the combined GCs. One is given by pairwise averaging GCs between sensors based on Hungarian assignment and the other merges close GCs for trace minimal, yet, conservative covariance. The close connection of the result to the two approaches, known as covariance union and arithmetic averaging, is unveiled. Simulations based on a sensor network consisting of both linear and nonlinear sensors, have demonstrated the advantage of our approaches over the generalized covariance intersection approach.