Toward a fully decentralized architecture for multi-sensor data fusion

A fully decentralized architecture is presented for data fusion problems. This architecture takes the form of a network of sensor nodes, each with its own processing facility, which together do not require any central processor or any central communication facility. In this architecture, computation is performed locally and communication occurs between any two nodes. Such an architecture has many desirable properties, including robustness to sensors failure and flexibility to the addition or loss of one or more sensors. This architecture is appropriate for the class of extended Kalman filter (EKF)-based geometric data fusion problems. The starting point for this architecture is an algorithm which allows the complete decentralization of the multisensor EKF equations among a number of sensing nodes. This algorithm is described, and it is shown how it can be applied to a number of different data-fusion problems. An application of this algorithm to the problem of multicamera, real-time tracking of objects and people moving through a room is described