A practical approach for target tracking in sparsely deployed binary sensor network

In this paper we propose a novel real time approach to localize and track a target using sparsely (non-overlapping) deployed binary sensors. Each of these sensors reports 1-bit information regarding a target's presence or absence within its sensing range. Our technique estimates the distance covered by a target on the basis of the time it spends in the sensing region. The trajectory of the target is approximated by a piece-wise linear path, where each piece is an estimated tangent segment to a pair of circular sensing range of two adjacent sensors that sense the target. The formulation of the problem as estimates of tangent segments allows us to convert the original problem into a quadratic programming problem. We compare the results of the proposed method with that of the other existing methods and demonstrate that even with a sparse deployment, our approach tracks the target with competitive accuracy. © 2012 IEEE.