The book explores object and situation fusion processes with an appropriate handling of uncertainties, and applies cutting-edge artificial intelligence and emerging technologies like particle filtering, spatiotemporal clustering, net-centricity, agent formalism, and distributed fusion together with essential Level 1 techniques and Level 1/2 interactions.

Data Fusion Methodology and Applications explores the data-driven discovery paradigm in science and the need to handle large amounts of diverse data. Drivers of this change include the increased availability and accessibility of hyphenated analytical platforms, imaging techniques, the explosion of omics data, and the development of information technology. As data-driven research deals with an inductive attitude that aims to extract information and build models capable of inferring the underlying phenomena from the data itself, this book explores the challenges and methodologies used to integrate data from multiple sources, analytical platforms, different modalities, and varying timescales. Presents the first comprehensive textbook on data fusion, focusing on all aspects of data-driven discovery Includes comprehensible, theoretical chapters written for large and diverse audiences Provides a wealth of selected application to the topics included

Scientists and engineers conducting research for military applicationsshare their findings on the semiautomation of the functionalities ofcognition, comprehension, and projection so that machines can replaceor enhance human awareness of a situation. A first volume surveysvarious options for practitioners, and this second volume identifiesoptions that have been chosen by the Technical Cooperation Programrepresentatives from different countries. It covers information fusionconcepts, distributed information fusion and management, human-systeminteraction, scenario-based design, and measures of effectiveness. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

With the recent proliferation of service-oriented architectures (SOA), cloud computing technologies, and distributed-interconnected systems, distributed fusion is taking on a larger role in a variety of applications—from environmental monitoring and crisis management to intelligent buildings and defense. Drawing on the work of leading experts around the world, Distributed Data Fusion for Network-Centric Operations examines the state of the art of data fusion in a distributed sensing, communications, and computing environment. Get Insight into Designing and Implementing Data Fusion in a Distributed Network Addressing the entirety of information fusion, the contributors cover everything from signal and image processing, through estimation, to situation awareness. In particular, the work offers a timely look at the issues and solutions involving fusion within a distributed network enterprise. These include critical design problems, such as how to maintain a pedigree of agents or nodes that receive information, provide their contribution to the dataset, and pass to other network components. The book also tackles dynamic data sharing within a network-centric enterprise, distributed fusion effects on state estimation, graph-theoretic methods to optimize fusion performance, human engineering factors, and computer ontologies for higher levels of situation assessment. A comprehensive introduction to this emerging field and its challenges, the book explores how data fusion can be used within grid, distributed, and cloud computing architectures. Bringing together both theoretical and applied research perspectives, this is a valuable reference for fusion researchers and practitioners. It offers guidance and insight for those working on the complex issues of designing and implementing distributed, decentralized information fusion.

Abstract : Information fusion is the process of aggregating knowledge from multiple data sources to produce more consistent, accurate, and useful information than any one individual source can provide. In general, there are three primary sources of data/information: humans, algorithms, and sensors. Typically, objective data---e.g., measurements---arise from sensors. Using these data sources, applications such as computer vision and remote sensing have long been applying fusion at different "levels" (signal, feature, decision, etc.). Furthermore, the daily advancement in engineering technologies like smart cars, which operate in complex and dynamic environments using multiple sensors, are raising both the demand for and complexity of fusion. There is a great need to discover new theories to combine and analyze heterogeneous data arising from one or more sources. The work collected in this dissertation addresses the problem of feature- and decision-level fusion. Specifically, this work focuses on fuzzy choquet integral (ChI)-based data fusion methods. Most mathematical approaches for data fusion have focused on combining inputs relative to the assumption of independence between them. However, often there are rich interactions (e.g., correlations) between inputs that should be exploited. The ChI is a powerful aggregation tool that is capable modeling these interactions. Consider the fusion of m sources, where there are 2m unique subsets (interactions); the ChI is capable of learning the worth of each of these possible source subsets. However, the complexity of fuzzy integral-based methods grows quickly, as the number of trainable parameters for the fusion of m sources scales as 2m. Hence, we require a large amount of training data to avoid the problem of over-fitting. This work addresses the over-fitting problem of ChI-based data fusion with novel regularization strategies. These regularization strategies alleviate the issue of over-fitting while training with limited data and also enable the user to consciously push the learned methods to take a predefined, or perhaps known, structure. Also, the existing methods for training the ChI for decision- and feature-level data fusion involve quadratic programming (QP). The QP-based learning approach for learning ChI-based data fusion solutions has a high space complexity. This has limited the practical application of ChI-based data fusion methods to six or fewer input sources. To address the space complexity issue, this work introduces an online training algorithm for learning ChI. The online method is an iterative gradient descent approach that processes one observation at a time, enabling the applicability of ChI-based data fusion on higher dimensional data sets. In many real-world data fusion applications, it is imperative to have an explanation or interpretation. This may include providing information on what was learned, what is the worth of individual sources, why a decision was reached, what evidence process(es) were used, and what confidence does the system have on its decision. However, most existing machine learning solutions for data fusion are "black boxes," e.g., deep learning. In this work, we designed methods and metrics that help with answering these questions of interpretation, and we also developed visualization methods that help users better understand the machine learning solution and its behavior for different instances of data.

This new resource provides a coherent, intuitive, and theoretical foundation for the fusion and exploitation of traditional sensor data as well as text-based information. In addition to presenting a detailed discussion of base-level data fusion requirements, a variety of higher level exploitation algorithms are presented that perform fully automated relationship discovery, rank interest level of entities, and support context-sensitive behavior understanding (both static and dynamic context). This book identifies eight canonical fusion forms as well as twenty foundational fusion services to enable formal mapping between models and services. Normalization and representation processes for (hard) sensor data and (soft) semantic data are described as well as methods for combining hard and soft data. Included is a prototype fusion system developed to implement virtually all the presented applications in order to demonstrate the robustness and utility of the design principles presented in this resource. The prototype system presented supports a variety of user workflows and all the applications are fully integrated. There is extensive fusion system output for unclassified scenarios to permit the reader to fully understand all presented design principles. This book also presents context-sensitive fuzzy semantic spatial and temporal reasoning.

This book includes papers from the section “Multisensor Information Fusion”, from Sensors between 2018 to 2019. It focuses on the latest research results of current multi-sensor fusion technologies and represents the latest research trends, including traditional information fusion technologies, estimation and filtering, and the latest research, artificial intelligence involving deep learning.