The nature and complexity of the security threats faced by our society in recent years have made it clear that a smart pervasive surveillance system constitutes the most effective cure, as it presents a conducive framework for seamless interaction between preventative capabilities and investigative protocols. Applications such as wild-life preserve monitoring, natural disaster warnings, and facility surveillance tend to be characterized by large and remote geographic areas, requiring large numbers of unattended sensor nodes to cover the volume-of-interest. Such large unattended sensor networks add new challenges as well as complicate the system management problem. Such challenges can be in the form of distributed operation with collaborative decision making, adaptive performance, and energy-aware strategies, to name a few. To meet the challenges of these mission-critical applications, the sensor system must exhibit capabilities such as heterogeneous and self-organized behaviour, data and information fusion, and collaborative resources control and management. Sensor Management (SM) refers to the process that plans and controls the use of the sensor nodes in a manner that synergistically maximizes the success rate of the whole system in achieving the goals of its mission in assessing the situation in a timely, reliable, and accurate fashion. Managing heterogeneous sensors involves making decisions and compromises regarding alternate sensing strategies under time and resource availability constraints. As a result, the performance of the collective sensors dictates the performance of the entire system. Consequently, there is a need for an intelligent Sensor Management Framework (SMF) to drive the system performance. SMF provides a control system to manage and coordinate the use of sensing resources in a manner that maximizes the system success rate in achieving its goals. An SMF must handle an overwhelming amount of information collected, and adapt to the highly dynamic environments, in addition to network and system limitations. This thesis proposes a resource-aware and intelligent SMF for managing pervasive sensor systems in surveillance context. The proposed SMF considerably improves the process of information acquisition by coordinating the sensing resources in order to gather the most reliable data from a dynamic scene while operating under energy constraints. The proposed SMF addresses both the operation of the coordination paradigm, as well as, the local and collaborative decision making strategies. A conceptual analysis of the SM problem in a layered structure is discussed to introduce an open and flexible design framework based on the service-oriented architecture to provide a modular, reusable, and extendable framework for the proposed SMF solution. A novel sensor management architecture, called Extended Hybrid Architecture for Sensor Management (E-HASM), is proposed. E-HASM combines the operation of the holonic, federated, and market-based architectures in a complementary manner. Moreover, a team-theoretic formulation of Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI), that represent the E-HASM components, is proposed as a mechanism for effective energy-aware decision making to address the local sensor utility. Also, intelligent schemes that provide adaptive sensor operation to the changes in environment dynamics and sensor energy levels are designed to include adaptive sleep, active sensing, dynamic sensing range, adaptive multimodality, and constrained communication. Furthermore, surveillance systems usually operate under uncertainty in stochastic environment. Therefore, this research formulates the collaborative decision-making entities as Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDP). To increase the tracking quality and the level of the information reliability, cooperation between the sensors is adopted, which adds an extra dimension in the design of the proposed SMFs. The propose SMF is implemented using the Jadex platform and is compared to the popular centralized architecture. The results illustrate the operation of the proposed SMF outperforms in terms of tracking quality, detection rate, energy consumption, network lifetime, and scalability.

<p>This thesis is a part of the SIREOS project at Swedish Defence Research Agency which aims at developing a sensor system consisting of infrared and video sensors and an integrated navigation system. The sensor system is placed in a camera gimbal and will be used on moving platforms, e.g. UAVs, for surveillance and reconnaissance. The gimbal is a device that makes it possible for the sensors to point in a desired direction. </p><p>In this thesis the sensor pointing problem is studied. The problem is analyzed and a system design is proposed. The major blocks in the system design are gimbal trajectory planning and gimbal motion control. In order to develop these blocks, kinematic and dynamic models are derived using techniques from robotics. The trajectory planner is based on the kinematic model and can handle problems with mechanical constraints, kinematic singularity, sensor placement offset and reference signal transformation. </p><p>The gimbal motion controller is tested with two different control strategies, PID and LQ. The challenge is to perform control that responds quickly, but do not excite the damping flexibility too much. The LQ-controller uses a linearization of the dynamic model to fulfil these requirements.</p>

The nature and complexity of the security threats faced by our society in recent years have made it clear that a smart pervasive surveillance system constitutes the most effective cure, as it presents a conducive framework for seamless interaction between preventative capabilities and investigative protocols. Applications such as wild-life preserve monitoring, natural disaster warnings, and facility surveillance tend to be characterized by large and remote geographic areas, requiring large numbers of unattended sensor nodes to cover the volume-of-interest. Such large unattended sensor networks add new challenges as well as complicate the system management problem. Such challenges can be in the form of distributed operation with collaborative decision making, adaptive performance, and energy-aware strategies, to name a few. To meet the challenges of these mission-critical applications, the sensor system must exhibit capabilities such as heterogeneous and self-organized behaviour, data and information fusion, and collaborative resources control and management. Sensor Management (SM) refers to the process that plans and controls the use of the sensor nodes in a manner that synergistically maximizes the success rate of the whole system in achieving the goals of its mission in assessing the situation in a timely, reliable, and accurate fashion. Managing heterogeneous sensors involves making decisions and compromises regarding alternate sensing strategies under time and resource availability constraints. As a result, the performance of the collective sensors dictates the performance of the entire system. Consequently, there is a need for an intelligent Sensor Management Framework (SMF) to drive the system performance. SMF provides a control system to manage and coordinate the use of sensing resources in a manner that maximizes the system success rate in achieving its goals. An SMF must handle an overwhelming amount of information collected, and adapt to the highly dynamic environments, in addition to network and system limitations. This thesis proposes a resource-aware and intelligent SMF for managing pervasive sensor systems in surveillance context. The proposed SMF considerably improves the process of information acquisition by coordinating the sensing resources in order to gather the most reliable data from a dynamic scene while operating under energy constraints. The proposed SMF addresses both the operation of the coordination paradigm, as well as, the local and collaborative decision making strategies. A conceptual analysis of the SM problem in a layered structure is discussed to introduce an open and flexible design framework based on the service-oriented architecture to provide a modular, reusable, and extendable framework for the proposed SMF solution. A novel sensor management architecture, called Extended Hybrid Architecture for Sensor Management (E-HASM), is proposed. E-HASM combines the operation of the holonic, federated, and market-based architectures in a complementary manner. Moreover, a team-theoretic formulation of Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI), that represent the E-HASM components, is proposed as a mechanism for effective energy-aware decision making to address the local sensor utility. Also, intelligent schemes that provide adaptive sensor operation to the changes in environment dynamics and sensor energy levels are designed to include adaptive sleep, active sensing, dynamic sensing range, adaptive multimodality, and constrained communication. Furthermore, surveillance systems usually operate under uncertainty in stochastic environment. Therefore, this research formulates the collaborative decision-making entities as Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDP). To increase the tracking quality and the level of the information reliability, cooperation between the sensors is adopted, which adds an extra dimension in the design of the proposed SMFs. The propose SMF is implemented using the Jadex platform and is compared to the popular centralized architecture. The results illustrate the operation of the proposed SMF outperforms in terms of tracking quality, detection rate, energy consumption, network lifetime, and scalability.

<p>The ground penetrating radar (GPR) is one of the most popular and successful sensing modalities that have been investigated for buried target detection (BTD). GPR offers excellent detection performance, however, it is limited by a low rate of advance (ROA) due to its short sensing standoff distance. Standoff distance refers to the distance between the sensing platform and the location in front of the platform where the GPR senses the ground. Large standoff (high ROA) sensing modalities have been investigated as alternatives to the GPR but they do not (yet) achieve comparable detection performance. Another strategy to improve the ROA of the GPR is to combine it with a large standoff sensor within the same BTD system, and to leverage the benefits of the respective modalities. This work investigates both of the aforementioned approaches to improve the ROA of GPR systems using statistical modeling techniques. The first part of the work investigates two large-standoff modalities for BTD systems. New detection algorithms are proposed in both cases with the goal of improving their detection performance so that it is more comparable with the GPR. The second part of the work investigates two methods of combining the GPR with a large standoff modality in order to yield a system with greater ROA, but similar target detection performance. All proposed statistical modeling approaches in this work are tested for efficacy using real field-collected data from BTD systems. The experimental results show that each of the proposed methods contribute towards the goal of improving the ROA of BTD systems.</p> / Dissertation

Le filtrage multiobjet est une technique de résolution du problème de détection et/ou suivi dans un contexte multicible. Cette thèse s'intéresse au filtre PHD (Probability Hypothesis Density), une célèbre approximation du filtre RFS (Random Finite Set) adaptée au cas où les observations sont le fruit d'un seul capteur. La première partie propose une construction rigoureuse du filtre PHD multicapteur exact et son expression simplifiée, sans approximation, grâce à un partitionnement joint de l'espace d'état des cibles et des capteurs. Avec cette nouvelle méthode, la solution exacte du filtre PHD multicapteur peut être propagée dans des scénarios de surveillance simples. La deuxième partie aborde le problème de gestion des capteurs dans le cadre du PHD. A chaque itération, le BET (Balanced Explorer and Tracker) construit une prédiction du PHD multicapteur a posteriori grâce au PIMS (Predicted Ideal Measurement Set) et définit un contrôle multicapteur en respectant quelques critères opérationnels simples adaptés aux missions de surveillance / The aim of multi-object filtering is to address the multiple target detection and/or tracking problem. This thesis focuses on the Probability Hypothesis Density (PHD) filter, a well-known tractable approximation of the Random Finite Set (RFS) filter when the observation process is realized by a single sensor. The first part proposes the rigorous construction of the exact multi-sensor PHD filter and its simplified expression, without approximation, through a joint partitioning of the target state space and the sensors. With this new method, the exact multi-sensor PHD can be propagated in simple surveillance scenarii. The second part deals with the sensor management problem in the PHD framework. At each iteration, the Balanced Explorer and Tracker (BET) builds a prediction of the posterior multi-sensor PHD thanks to the Predicted Ideal Measurement Set (PIMS) and produces a multi-sensor control according to a few simple operational principles adapted to surveillance activities

This master thesis presents the design and implementation of a framework for monitoringdata related to activities of daily living (ADL) in a smart home environment, conducted for theHuman Health and Activity Laboratory (H2Al) at Luleå University of Technology. The generalaim of such environments is to increase the quality of life by enabling elderly to live longer athome while reducing the consumption of resources necessary. The complexity of collection,filtering and storing of data in smart home environments is however inherent due to oftenmany interworking sensor-systems, which allmay have different APIs and communicationpathways. This means that knowing whether ‘all systems are go’ when for example doing astudy is not easy, especially for persons not trained in data science.This work therefore aim to design and implement a framework for datamonitoring thattargets smart home environments in which activities of daily living are important for analysisof health-related conditions and for the personalised tailoring of interventions. The frameworkprimarily collects data from four selected systems, that for example track the position andmovements of a person. The data is stored in a database and visualised on a website toallow for monitoring of individual sensor data being collected. The framework was validatedtogether with a occupational therapist through a proof-of-concept trial in the Human Healthand Activity Laboratory, for which healthy subjects conducted a typical test (making a salad)used when assessing human performance.In conclusion, the developed framework works as expected, collecting data frommanysensor systems and storing the data in a common format, while the visualisation on a websiteis perceived as giving an easy overview of monitored data. Additional data can easily be addedto the framework and other processes beyond monitoring can be linked to the data, suchas further data refinement and algorithms for activity recognition (possibly using machinelearning techniques). Future work include to better distinguish data from multiple occupants,develop themanagement of synchronous and asynchronous data, and refine the web interfacefor additional simplicity

By purposefully utilising sensors, for instance by a datafusion system, the state of some system-relevant environmentmight be adequately assessed to support decision-making. Theever increasing access to sensors o.ers great opportunities,but alsoincurs grave challenges. As a result of managingmultiple sensors one can, e.g., expect to achieve a morecomprehensive, resolved, certain and more frequently updatedassessment of the environment than would be possible otherwise.Challenges include data association, treatment of con.ictinginformation and strategies for sensor coordination. We use the term information acquisition to denote the skillof a data fusion system to actively acquire information. Theaim of this thesis is to instructively situate that skill in ageneral context, explore and classify related research, andhighlight key issues and possible future work. It is our hopethat this thesis will facilitate communication, understandingand future e.orts for information acquisition. The previously mentioned trend towards utilisation of largesets of sensors makes us especially interested in large-scaleinformation acquisition, i.e., acquisition using many andpossibly spatially distributed and heterogeneous sensors. Information acquisition is a general concept that emerges inmany di.erent .elds of research. In this thesis, we surveyliterature from, e.g., agent theory, robotics and sensormanagement. We, furthermore, suggest a taxonomy of theliterature that highlights relevant aspects of informationacquisition. We describe a function, perception management (akin tosensor management), which realizes information acquisition inthe data fusion process and pertinent properties of itsexternal stimuli, sensing resources, and systemenvironment. An example of perception management is also presented. Thetask is that of managing a set of mobile sensors that jointlytrack some mobile targets. The game theoretic algorithmsuggested for distributing the targets among the sensors proveto be more robust to sensor failure than a measurement accuracyoptimal reference algorithm. <b>Keywords:</b>information acquisition, sensor management,resource management, information fusion, data fusion,perception management, game theory, target tracking / NR 20140805

<p>This thesis concerns with the localization, tracking, and sensor management in the Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) radar systems. The collocated and widely-separated MIMO radars are separately discussed and the signal models are derived for both structures.</p> <p>The first chapter of the thesis is dedicated to the tracking and localization in collocated MIMO radars. A novel signal model is first formulated and the localization algorithm is developed for the derived signal model to estimate the location of multiple targets falling in the same resolution cell. Furthermore, a novel tracking algorithm is proposed in which the maximum bound on the number of uniquely detectable targets in the same cell is relaxed. The performance of the tracking and localization algorithms is finally evaluated using the tracking Posterior Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (PCRLB).</p> <p>After showing the impact of the antennas position on the localization CRLB, a novel sensor management technique is developed for the collocated MIMO radars in Chapter 4. A convex optimization technique is proposed for the antenna allocation in a single-target scenario. When multiple targets fall inside the same cell, a sampling-based technique is formulated to tackle the non-convexity of the optimization problem.</p> <p>The third chapter of this thesis also proposes new approaches for detection, localization, and tracking using a widely-separated MIMO radar. A scenario with multiple-scatterer targets is considered and the detection performance of both MIMO and multistatic radars will be evaluated in the designed scenario. To estimate the location of the multiple-scatterer target, a Multiple-Hypothesis (MH) based approach is proposed where the number and the location of multiple targets are both estimated. A particle filter based approach is also formulated for the dynamic tracking by a widely-separated MIMO radar. Finally, the performance of the MIMO radar and the miultistatic radar in detecting and localizing multiple-scatterer targets is studied.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation focuses on real-time decision-making for large-scale domain search and object classification using Multiple Autonomous Vehicles (MAV). In recent years, MAV systems have attracted considerable attention and have been widely utilized. Of particular interest is their application to search and classification under limited sensory capabilities. Since search requires sensor mobility and classification requires a sensor to stay within the vicinity of an object, search and classification are two competing tasks. Therefore, there is a need to develop real-time sensor allocation decision-making strategies to guarantee task accomplishment. These decisions are especially crucial when the domain is much larger than the field-of-view of a sensor, or when the number of objects to be found and classified is much larger than that of available sensors. In this work, the search problem is formulated as a coverage control problem, which aims at collecting enough data at every point within the domain to construct an awareness map. The object classification problem seeks to satisfactorily categorize the property of each found object of interest. The decision-making strategies include both sensor allocation decisions and vehicle motion control. The awareness-, Bayesian-, and risk-based decision-making strategies are developed in sequence. The awareness-based approach is developed under a deterministic framework, while the latter two are developed under a probabilistic framework where uncertainty in sensor measurement is taken into account. The risk-based decision-making strategy also analyzes the effect of measurement cost. It is further extended to an integrated detection and estimation problem with applications in optimal sensor management. Simulation-based studies are performed to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

<p>In the modern sensing environment, large numbers of sensor tasking decisions must be made using an increasingly diverse and powerful suite of sensors in order to best fulfill mission objectives in the presence of situationally-varying resource constraints. Sensor management algorithms allow the automation of some or all of the sensor tasking process, meaning that sensor management approaches can either assist or replace a human operator as well as ensure the safety of the operator by removing that operator from a dangerous operational environment. Sensor managers also provide improved system performance over unmanaged sensing approaches through the intelligent control of the available sensors. In particular, information-theoretic sensor management approaches have shown promise for providing robust and effective sensor manager performance.</p><p>This work develops information-theoretic sensor managers for a general static target detection problem. Two types of sensor managers are developed. The first considers a set of discrete objects, such as anomalies identified by an anomaly detector or grid cells in a gridded region of interest. The second considers a continuous spatial region in which targets may be located at any point in continuous space. In both types of sensor managers, the sensor manager uses a Bayesian, probabilistic framework to model the environment and tasks the sensor suite to make new observations that maximize the expected information gain for the system. The sensor managers are compared to unmanaged sensing approaches using simulated data and using real data from landmine detection and unexploded ordnance (UXO) discrimination applications, and it is demonstrated that the sensor managers consistently outperform the unmanaged approaches, enabling targets to be detected more quickly using the sensor managers. The performance improvement represented by the rapid detection of targets is of crucial importance in many static target detection applications, resulting in higher rates of advance and reduced costs and resource consumption in both military and civilian applications.</p> / Dissertation