Managing the Reliability of Information
Alain Appriou · 2014
Managing the reliability of the information fragments carried by a multisensor system is a problem of fundamental importance in the process of data fusion. The only approach capable of delivering the required rigor consists of transforming the evaluation provided by one source into an evaluation modified by the knowledge available about the reliability of that source, before it is taken as input by any function in the data fusion process. This chapter discusses the potential offered by the other theories, noting that probabilities do not provide a formal framework to deal with this problem in general. It shows that integration of reliability is similar to discounting of belief functions. The chapter focuses on more specific, but commonly encountered, situation where the reliability of sensors to be fused is expressed in the form of domains of validity, defined in spaces of contextual variables describing the sensors' environment and/or conditions of use.