Multimodal Sensor Selection for Multiple Spatial Field Reconstruction

The paper addresses the multimodal sensor selection problem where selected collocated sensor nodes are employed to effectively monitor and efficiently predict multiple spatial random fields. It is first proposed to exploit multivariate Gaussian processes (MGP) to model multiple spatial phenomena jointly. By the use of the Matern cross-covariance function, cross covariance matrices in the MGP model are sufficiently positive semi-definite, concomitantly providing efficient prediction of all multivariate processes at unmeasured locations. The multimodal sensor selection problem is then formulated and solved by an approximate algorithm with an aim to select the most informative sensor nodes so that prediction uncertainties at all the fields are minimized. The proposed approach was validated in the real-life experiments with promising results.