Robust fusion with reliabilities weights
Jean-François Grandin, Miguel Marques · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2002
The reliability is a value of the degree of trust in a given measurement. We analyze and compare: ML (Classical Maximum Likelihood), MLE (Maximum Likelihood weighted by Entropy), MLR (Maximum Likelihood weighted by Reliability), MLRE (Maximum Likelihood weighted by Reliability and Entropy), DS (Credibility Plausibility), DSR (DS weighted by reliabilities). The analysis is based on a model of a dynamical fusion process. It is composed of three sensors, which have each it's own discriminatory capacity, reliability rate, unknown bias and measurement noise. The knowledge of uncertainties is also severely corrupted, in order to analyze the robustness of the different fusion operators. Two sensor models are used: the first type of sensor is able to estimate the probability of each elementary hypothesis (probabilistic masses), the second type of sensor delivers masses on union of elementary hypotheses (DS masses). In the second case probabilistic reasoning leads to sharing the mass abusively between elementary hypotheses. Compared to the classical ML or DS which achieves just 50% of correct classification in some experiments, DSR, MLE, MLR and MLRE reveals very good performances on all experiments (more than 80% of correct classification rate). The experiment was performed with large variations of the reliability coefficients for each sensor (from 0 to 1), and with large variations on the knowledge of these coefficients (from 0 0.8). All four operators reveal good robustness, but the MLR reveals to be uniformly dominant on all the experiments in the Bayesian case and achieves the best mean performance under incomplete a priori information.