Information Fusion

Abstract

The study of information fusion comprises methods and techniques to automatically or semi-automatically combine information stemming from homogeneous or heterogeneous sources into a representation that supports a human user’s situation awareness for the purposes of decision making. Information fusion is not an end in itself but studies, adapts, applies and combines methods, techniques and algorithms provided by many other research areas, such as artificial intelligence, data mining, machine learning and optimization, in order to customize solutions for specific tasks. There are many different models for information fusion that describe the overall process as tasks building upon each other on different levels of abstraction. Information fusion includes the analysis of information, the inference of new information and the evaluation of uncertainty within the information. Hence, uncertainty management plays a vital role within the information fusion process. Uncertainty can be expressed by probability theory or, in the form of non-specificity and discord, by, for example, evidence theory.