The Effects of Pre-Fusion Probability Calibration

Quite often the state of information provided by disparate sources, or experts, is not conducive to fusion without additional pre-fusion processing. The focus of this paper involves testing the effects of two pre-processing steps to help illustrate the contribution of each to performance, and also testing two different fusion methods to illustrate how robust each are against lacking/imperfect pre-processing steps. The pre-processing steps, which are the focus of this study, are two calibration steps. The first calibrates overconfident expert information, and the second calibrates for track-to-track association ambiguity. The two fusion methods tested are Weighted Conflict Redistribution (WCR) Rule number 0—or WCR0 for short, and is also known as Dempster’s rule—and WCR2. WCR0 continues to produce the optimal fusion solution when both pre-processing calibration steps are performed perfectly, and yet, it is shown to be significantly less robust given significant miscalibration in the source probabilities.