A Novel Algorithm for Quantized Particle Filtering With Multiple Degrading Sensors: Degradation Estimation and Target Tracking

This article addresses the particle filtering problem for a class of nonlinear/non-Gaussian systems with quantized measurements and multiple degrading sensors. A degradation variable described by the Wiener process is proposed to describe the phenomenon of sensor degradation that is often encountered in engineering practice. The measurement output of each sensor is quantized by a uniform quantizer before being sent to the remote filter. An augmented system is constructed, which aggregates the original system state and the degradation variables. In the presence of the sensor degradation and the quantization errors, a new likelihood function at the remote filter is calculated by resorting to all the transmitted measurements. According to the mathematical characterization of the likelihood function, a novel particle filtering algorithm is developed, where the parameters of both the degradation processes and the quantization functions are exploited to obtain the modified importance weights. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is shown via a target tracking example with bearing measurements.