Concepts, Models, and Tools for Information Fusion

The ever-increasing amount of raw data and information in the contemporary world poses a significant challenge to command and control systems for military and public security operations, necessitating practices of data and information fusion, broadly characterized by the authors (of DRDC Valcartier, a Canadian military research organization, and the Defence Science and Technology in Organisation in Australia) as "the process of utilizing one or more data sources over time to assemble a representation of aspects of interest in an environment." These "aspects of interest" include traditional issues of military target tracking and newer issues pertaining to biography, economy, society, transport and telecommunications, geography, and politics. Drawing on concepts from psychology, human factors, knowledge representation, artificial intelligence, mathematical logic, and signal processing, they provide an explanation of data and information fusion for command and control systems. Concepts, definitions, and models are introduced, followed by discussion of quantitative, qualitative, and hybrid approaches to information fusion. Finally, the authors review computational implementation of information fusion, covering such topics as the design and performance of information systems and concepts in knowledge-based and artificial intelligence systems that impact higher-level fusion processes. Annotation c2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)