Fusion as an Operation on Formal Systems: A Formal Framework for Information Fusion

摘要

This project was focused on a formal framework for analyzing and developing information fusion systems. Category theory was selected as the formal basis for specifying information fusion systems. A formal definition of information fusion was introduced. Various kinds of fusion were defined, their properties and inter-relationships analyzed. An initial ontology of information fusion was presented. A procedure for developing information fusion systems using formal methods was proposed. Examples of reasoning about measures of effectiveness of information fusion systems were shown. Towards this goal fuzzy logic was formally specified in the Slang language and properties of information fusion were proved. This showed that within this formal framework one can reason about the system being developed in the specification and design phases, rather than after deployment. Finally, the selection of wavelet based features for ATR was investigated within the formal framework.