Combination of Sources of Evidence with Distinct Frames of Discernment

Multi-source information fusion strategies in target recognition have been widely applied. Generally, each source is defined and modelled over a common frame composed of the hypotheses to discern. However, in practice, the independent sources of evidence can refer to distinct frames of discernment in terms of the hypotheses they consider. Under this condition, the classical combination process cannot be applied directly. Working with distinct frames of discernment for information fusion is a problem often encountered in the development of recognition systems which requires a particular attention. In order to combine such sources, this paper presents a new combination method which splits the process of fusion into two steps: construction of granular structure, calculation of belief mass, followed by the fusion process. Our simulations results show that the proposed method can effectively solve the problem of fusion of sources defined on distinct frames.