Fusion strategies for deployment of binary decision sensors in multichoice decision environments
Belur V. Dasarathy · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1996
Fusion strategies, conceived for deployment in multi-sensor environments wherein individual sensors or information sources offer only binary decisions, are presented. Alternative strategies are analyzed to derive a relative assessment of their application potential. The analysis takes into account the a priori probabilities or likelihoods of the different decision choices in the environment in developing estimates of the processing demands corresponding to these strategies. This brings into focus the feasibility of designing the system to be adaptive to take full advantage of the information about the relative likelihoods of the different decision choices facing the processor as the information evolves during the specific instance of the decision making process. Strategies, which are insensitive to the relative probabilities of the alternative decision choices, are also brought out under this analysis. The relative merits of these alternatives, their preferred domains in the class a priori probability space, and their relevance to different application environments are discussed to identify the natural domains of application of these strategies.