Mutual information based data association

Abstract

Relating information originating from disparate sensors without any attempt to model the environment or the behaviour of any particular object within it is a challenging task. Inspired by human perception, the focus of this paper will be on observing objects moving in space using sensors that operate based on different physical principles and the fact that motion has in principle, greater power to specify properties of an object than purely spatial information captured as a single observation in time. The contribution of this paper include the development of a novel strategy for detecting a set of signals that are statistically dependent and correspond to each other related by a common cause. Mutual Information is proposed as a measure of statistical dependence. The algorithm is evaluated through simulations and three application domains, which includes, (1.) Grouping problem in images, (2.) Data association problem in moving observers with dynamic targets, and (3.) Multi-modal sensor fusion.