Yaqub Aris Prabowo

Andrei Starodubov, Yaqub Aris Prabowo, Andreas Hadjipieris et al.

Robust single-vessel tracking from fixed coastal platforms is hindered by modality-specific degradations: cameras suffer from illumination and visual clutter, while LiDAR performance drops with range and intermittent returns. We present a particle-filter tracker that supports sequential measurement-level camera-LiDAR fusion and an information-gain (entropy-reduction) adaptive sensing policy that selects the most informative sensing modality at each fusion time bin. The approach is validated in a real maritime deployment at the Cyprus Marine and Maritime Institute Smart Marina Testbed (Ayia Napa Marina, Cyprus), using a shore-mounted 3D LiDAR and an elevated fixed camera to track a rigid inflatable boat with onboard GNSS ground truth. We compare LiDAR-only, camera-only, All sensors, and adaptive configurations. Results show LiDAR dominates near-field accuracy, the camera sustains longer-range coverage when LiDAR becomes unavailable, and the adaptive policy achieves a favorable accuracy-continuity trade-off by switching modalities based on information gain. The adaptive configuration therefore provides a practical sensor-selection baseline for resilient and resource-aware maritime surveillance.

Andrei Starodubov, Yaqub Aris Prabowo, Andreas Hadjipieris et al.

This paper presents an information-gain-guided reinforcement-learning sensor-selection framework for single-vessel tracking in heterogeneous maritime sensor networks. The proposed approach is motivated by information-theoretic sensor management: instead of activating all sensors or repeatedly performing computationally expensive online expected-information-gain evaluation, a learned policy selects one tracking-relevant sensor at each decision epoch. A Bayesian sequential Monte Carlo tracker estimates the vessel state from noisy measurements and provides a belief representation for scheduling under nonlinear and non-Gaussian conditions. A Proximal Policy Optimization agent selects one of five sensors deployed in a georeferenced simulation of the CMMI Smart Marina testbed at Ayia Napa Marina, Cyprus. The agent observes belief-state, detection-history, coverage, sensor-geometry, and realized-information-gain features. The reward is defined as a realized-information-gain term gated by an observability mask. Final-test simulations compare the proposed framework with random single-sensor selection, always-on sensing using all sensors simultaneously, and the expected-information-gain sensor-selection baseline proposed in our previous work. Results show that the learned policy achieves tracking performance close to always-on sensing while activating only one sensor per decision time step and avoiding the computationally expensive online entropy search required by expected-information-gain selection.