Binary Variational Filtering for Target Tracking in Sensor Networks

Target tracking in wireless sensor networks (WSN) has brought up new practical problems. The limited energy supply and bandwidth of WSN have put stringent constraints on the complexity and inter-node information exchange of the tracking algorithm. In this paper, we propose a binary variational algorithm outperforming existing target tracking algorithms such as Kalman and Particle filtering. The variational formulation allows an implicit compression of the exchanged statistics between leader nodes, enabling thus a distributed decision-making. Its binary extension further reduces the resource consumption by locally exchanging only few bits.