An Essay to Characterise Information Fusion Systems

Characterisation of an information fusion system (IFS) is a very difficult challenge. There are many levels of information fusion and there are many decision fusion models. One can argue that each problem is very specific and thus developing a generalized framework is utopia. This paper presents a simplified, and sometimes naive representation of IFS. This representation is based on characterising the inputs and outputs of IFS. An IFS is thus seen as a function that transforms the input into an output given some conditions. These conditions might include controls, background knowledge, and goals queries. We present a set of properties that might be considered to characterise a fusion function. This paper also discusses some challenges of distributed information fusion as a pre-requisite of Net-enabled operations