ABSTRACT
During the past two decades, extensive research and development (R&D) on multisensor data fusion has been performed for the Department of Defense (DoD). By the early 1990s, an extensive set of fusion systems had been reported for a variety of applications ranging from automated target recognition (ATR) and identi cation-friend-foe-neutral (IFFN) systems to systems for battle eld surveillance. Hall et al.1 provided a description of 54 such systems and an analysis of the types of fusion processing, the applications, the algorithms, and the level of maturity of the reported systems. Subsequent to that survey, Llinas and Antony2 described 13 data fusion systems that performed automated reasoning (e.g., for situation assessment) using the blackboard reasoning architecture. By the mid-1990s, extensive commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software was becoming available for different data fusion techniques and decision support. Hall and Linn3 described a survey of COTS software for data fusion (an update of which is provided in this handbook) and Buede4,5 performed surveys and analyses of COTS software for decision support.
