Target Tracking on Sensing Surface with Electrical Impedance Tomography

An emerging class of applications uses sensing surfaces, where sensor data is collected from a 2-dimensional surface covering a large spatial area. Sensing surface applications range from observing human activity to detecting failures of construction materials. Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is an imaging technology, which has been successfully applied to imaging in several important application domains such as medicine, geophysics, and process industry. EIT is a low-cost technology offering high temporal resolution, which makes it a potential technology sensing surfaces. In this paper, we evaluate the applicability of EIT algorithms for tracking a small moving object on a 2D sensing surface. We compare standard EIT algorithms for this purpose and develop a method which models the movement of a small target on a sensing surface using hidden Markov models (HMM). Existing EIT methods are geared towards high image quality instead of smooth target trajectories, which makes them suboptimal for target tracking. Numerical experiments indicate that our proposed method outperforms existing EIT methods in target tracking accuracy.