Variational Bayesian Algorithms for Maneuvering Target Tracking with Nonlinear Measurements in Sensor Networks

The variational Bayesian method solves nonlinear estimation problems by iteratively computing the integral of the marginal density. Many researchers have demonstrated the fact its performance depends on the linear approximation in the computation of the variational density in the iteration and the degree of nonlinearity of the underlying scenario. In this paper, two methods for computing the variational density, namely, the natural gradient method and the simultaneous perturbation stochastic method, are used to implement a variational Bayesian Kalman filter for maneuvering target tracking using Doppler measurements. The latter are collected from a set of sensors subject to single-hop network constraints. We propose a distributed fusion variational Bayesian Kalman filter for a networked maneuvering target tracking scenario and both of the evidence lower bound and the posterior Cramér–Rao lower bound of the proposed methods are presented. The simulation results are compared with centralized fusion in terms of posterior Cramér–Rao lower bounds, root-mean-squared errors and the 3σ bound.