Tracking of a Rotating Object in a Wireless Sensor
Network Using Fuzzy Based Adaptive IMM Filter
Amin Hassani
∗,†
, Alexander Bertrand
∗,†
, Marc Moonen
∗,†
∗ KU Leuven, Department of Electrical Engineering-ESAT, SCD-SISTA / † iMinds Future Health Department
Address: Kasteelpark Arenberg 10, B-3001 Leuven, Belgium
E-mail: amin.hassani@esat.kuleuven.be
alexander.bertrand@esat.kuleuven.be
marc.moonen@esat.kuleuven.be
Abstract—In this paper, a new fuzzy-logic based adaptive
Interactive Multiple Model (IMM) filter is presented for tracking
a vehicular rotating object in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN).
In this method, a Fuzzy-logic Inference System (FIS) is employed
to adaptively tune the system noise covariance matrix associated
with the Nearly Constant Velocity (NCV) model. By reducing the
number of interacting models, our algorithm simplifies state-of-
the-art IMM algorithms for tracking of a rotating object. Local-
ization for data aggregation process is performed by means of the
triangulation method in conjunction with dynamic grouping of
sensors. Monte Carlo simulations show that this scheme achieves
good tracking performance for both highly rotating and non-
rotating objects compared to state-of-the-art IMM algorithms.
I. INTRODUCTION
The capability to manufacture small-sized and low-cost
sensor nodes, which include sensing, data processing, and
communication components, makes it possible to set up
so-called Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). This emerging
technology has been utilized for environmental measuring,
monitoring, surveillance, audio enhancement, and many other
applications. A WSN consists of many low cost, spatially
dispersed position sensor nodes. Each node can process infor-
mation and share data with the sensor nodes that are placed
within its communication range or only with a leader node
(cluster head). The advantages of WSNs over the traditional
sensing methods are not only extending the spatial coverage
and achieving higher resolution, but also increasing the fault
tolerance and robustness of the whole system [1].
Among the WSN applications, object tracking has received
great attention for commercial, public-safety, and military ap-
Acknowledgements : This work was carried out at the ESAT Laboratory
of KU Leuven, in the frame of KU Leuven Research Council CoE EF/05/006
Optimization in Engineering (OPTEC) and PFV/10/002 (OPTEC), Concerted
Research Action GOA-MaNet, the Belgian Programme on Interuniversity
Attraction Poles initiated by the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office
IUAP P6/04 (DYSCO, Dynamical systems, control and optimization, 2007-
2011), and Research Project FWO nr. G.0763.12 (wireless acoustic sensor
networks for extended auditory communication’). The work of A. Bertrand
was supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Research Foundation -
Flanders (FWO). The scientic responsibility is assumed by its authors.
plications. The greatest challenge associated with this problem
is the accuracy of the state estimation module. Since the nodes
of a WSN are physically distributed, the computation and
estimation procedure in object tracking should preferably also
be distributed. For an object with nearly constant velocity,
kinematics will be linear and the tracking problem could be
performed using the standard Kalman Filter (KF). However,
when rotation is to be taken into consideration, the single
standard (linear) KF is not applicable anymore due to the
fact that in this case the dynamics are nonlinear. This issue
makes that the unknown acceleration appears as large process
noise in the object model and since the model’s noise level
cannot cover it, filter divergence may occur. A first attempt to
resolve this difficulty was made by Singer [2], who proposed
an object localization model in which rotation was assumed to
be a first-order Markov process with time correlation. Many
approaches were proposed for increasing the performance of
the filters with a single model. Some works also combined
fuzzy logic with the KF [3], but still were not able to track
a highly rotating object because of the hybrid nature of the
problem. Later, various techniques were developed, where
multiple models are used to describe the different potential
modes of object motion where the final estimate is obtained
by a weighted sum of the estimates from the sub-filters of
the different models [4]. In this scheme, different levels of
potential object movements are performed in parallel using dis-
tinct filters. To be more realistic, rotations are typically abrupt
deviations from basically a straight-line object motion and
therefore the problem can be treated as a hybrid problem. One
of the most successful yet challenging hybrid state estimators
is an Interactive Multiple Model (IMM) approach which has
received a large amount of research attention on itself. How-
ever, this algorithm needs predefined sub-models with different
dimensions or process noise levels, and may not guarantee
good performance in the case where one of the models does
not exactly match the object’s motion. An approach to resolve
this problem is estimating an unknown input simultaneously
or using the adaptive IMM (AIMM) algorithm, where the
input is estimated by a two-stage Kalman estimator and sub-
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c
2012 IEEE