Object detection for military surveillance using distributed multimodal smart sensors

This paper considers an autonomous ground Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) system comprising of multiple distributed, wirelessly communicating smart sensors. The ISR system, in turn, is a part of a larger System of Systems (SoS) consisting of aerial, manned, etc. surveillance systems and information collection centers. The smart sensors of the ISR system perform environment monitoring using different modalities and exchange object detection and identification results to assess the situation and provide other SoS components with this information. In the paper we discuss using acoustic, magnetic and Passive Infrared (PIR) sensor information for target detection and identification. We also propose an approach of distributed acoustic source localization and a method of velocity estimation using PIR data. For sensor communication an asynchronous ad-hoc WSN configuration is proposed. The system is implemented on low power smart sensors utilizing Atmel ATmega128RFA1 processors with integrated 2.4GHz IEEE 802.15.4 compliant radio transceivers.