A quantization architecture for track fusion

Many practical multi-sensor tracking systems are based on some form of track fusion, in which local track estimates and their associated covariances are shared among sensors. Communication load is a significant concern, and the goal of this paper is to propose an architecture for low-bandwidth track fusion. The scheme involves intelligent scalar and vector quantization of the local state estimates and of the associated estimation error covariance matrices. Simulation studies indicate that the communication saving can be quite significant, with only minor degradation of track accuracy.