which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. One of the fundamental requirements for visual surveillance with Visual Sensor Networks (VSN) is the correct association of camera’s observations with the tracks of objects under tracking. In this paper, we model the data association in VSN as an inference problem on dynamic Bayesian networks (DBN) and investigate the key problems for efficient data association in case of missing detection. Firstly, to deal with the problem of missing detection, we introduce a set of random variables, namely routine variables, into the DBN model to describe the uncertainty in the path taken by the moving objects and propose the high-order spatio-temporal model based inference algorithm. Secondly, for the problem of computational intractability of exact inference, we derive two approximate inference algorithms by factorizing the belief state based on the marginal and conditional independence assumptions. Thirdly, we incorporate the inference algorithm into EM framework to make the algorithm suitable for the case when object appearance parameters are unknown. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate the effect of the proposed methods. 1.