Search for optimal sensor management
Keith D. Kastella, Stanton Musick · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1996
Several sensor management schemes based on information theoretic metrics such as discrimination gain have been proposed, motivated by the generality of such schemes and their ability to accommodate mixed types of information such as kinematic and classification data. On the other hand, there are many methods for managing a single sensor to optimize detection. This paper compares the performance against low signal-noise ratio targets of a discrimination gain scheme with three such single sensor detection schemes: the Wald test, an index policy that is optimal under certain circumstances and an 'alert-confirm' scheme modeled on methods used in some existing radars. For the situation where the index policy is optimal, it outperforms discrimination gain by a slight margin. However, the index policy assumes that there is only one target present. It performs poorly when there are multiple targets while discrimination gain and the Wald test continue to perform well. In addition, we show how discrimination gain can be extended to multisensor/multitarget detection and classification problems that are difficult for these other methods. One issue that arises with the use of discrimination gain as a metric is that it depends on both the current density and an a priori distribution. We examine the dependence of discrimination gain on this prior and find that while the discrimination depends on the prior, the gain is prior-independent.