Distributed Target Detection in Sensor Networks Using Scan Statistics

We introduce a sequential procedure to detect a target with distributed sensors in a two dimensional region. The detection is carried out in a mobile fusion center which successively counts the number of binary decisions reported by local sensors lying inside its moving field of view. This is a two-dimensional scan statistic-an emerging tool from the statistics field that has been applied to a variety of anomaly detection problems such as of epidemics or computer intrusion, but that seems to be unfamiliar to the signal processing community. We show that an optimal size of the field of view exists. We compare the sequential two-dimensional scan statistic test and two other tests. Results for system level detection are presented.