Outlier-robust calibration method for sensor networks

In this paper, we aim to blindly calibrate the responses of a sensor network whose outputs are possibly corrupted by outliers. In particular, we extend some well-known nullspace-based blind calibration approaches, proposed for fixed sensors with affine responses—i.e., with unknown gain and offset for each sensor—to that difficult case. These state-of-the-art approaches assume that the true data lie in a known lower dimensional subspace, so that in practice sensors can be calibrated by projection of the uncalibrated observations to this subspace. A robust extension was recently proposed in order to provide less sensitivity to noise. In this paper, we show that such methods (including the robust extensions) are very sensitive to outliers and we propose new extensions able to deal with such issues. For that purpose, we assume the outliers to be rare events, which can be modeled as a sparse contribution to the low-rank observed data. Using such an assumption, we separate sparse outliers from the low-rank data, so that we can perform calibration. We show that the proposed approach is able to handle up to 10% of outliers in the data without major impact on the calibration accuracy while state-of-the-art methods are already sensitive to the presence of one unique outlier.