ABSTRACT
During the past two decades, extensive research and development 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 identification-friend-foe-neutral (IFFN) systems to systems for battlefield surveillance. Hall, Linn, and Llinas
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 Antony
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 for decision support. Hall and Linn
described a survey of COTS software for data fusion and Buede
performed surveys and analyses of COTS software for decision support. This chapter presents a new survey of data fusion systems for DoD applications. The survey was part
of an extensive effort to identify and assess DoD fusion systems and activities. This chapter summarizes 79 systems and provides an assessment of the types of fusion processing performed and their operational status.
