Target Counting with Wireless Sensor Networks: Spatial Models and Presburger Arithmetic

11^th March 2020, 13:00
Sven Linker

Abstract

One of the applications popularised by the emergence of wireless sensor networks is target counting: the computational task of determining the total number of targets located in an area by aggregating the individual counts of each sensor. The complexity of this task lies in the fact that sensing ranges may overlap, therefore targets may be overcounted as, in this setting, they are assumed to be indistinguishable from each other. In the literature, this problem has been proven to be unsolvable, hence the existence of several estimation algorithms.However, the main limitation currently affecting these algorithms is that no assurance regarding the precision of a solution can be given.

In this talk, I present a formal model developed to reason about topologies created by sensor ranges, tailored to specify relations between parts of the space with respect to sensor coverage. Subsequently, I present a novel algorithm for target counting based on exhaustive enumeration of target distributions using linear Presburger constraints. This algorithm improves on current approaches since the obtained estimated counts are by construction guaranteed to be consistent with the counts of each sensor, and can be extended to allow for weighted topologies and sensing errors.