Sensor Management Method of Giving Priority to Confirmed Identified Targets

Sensors (Basel). 2023 Apr 13;23(8):3959. doi: 10.3390/s23083959.

Abstract

The optimization objective function of sensor management for target identification is commonly established based on information theory indicators such as information gain, discrimination, discrimination gain, and quadratic entropy, which can control the sensors to reduce the overall uncertainty of all targets to be identified but ignores the speed of target being confirmed as identified. Therefore, inspired by the maximum posterior criterion of target identification and the target identification confirmation mechanism, we study a sensor management method that preferentially allocates resources to identifiable targets. Firstly, in the distributed target identification framework based on Bayesian theory, an improved identification probability prediction method that provides feedback the global identification results to local classifiers is proposed, which can improve the accuracy of identification probability prediction. Secondly, an effective sensor management function based on information entropy and expected confidence level is proposed to optimize the identification uncertainty itself rather than its variation, which can increase the priority of targets that satisfy the desired confidence level. In the end, the sensor management for target identification is modeled as a sensor allocation problem, and the optimization objective function based on the effective function is constructed, which can improve the target identification speed. The experimental results show that the correct identification rate of the proposed method is comparable to the methods based on information gain, discrimination, discrimination gain, and quadratic entropy in different scenarios, but the average time to confirm the identification is the shortest.

Keywords: desired confidence level; entropy; information theory; sensor management; target identification.

Grants and funding

This research received no external funding.