Optimal decision fusion with applications to target detection in wireless ad hoc sensor networks

Decision fusion is a decentralized decision making process where local decisions are combined to reach a global decision. In this work, we propose a complementary optimal decision fusion (CODF) method to the target detection task that arises in wireless ad hoc sensor network signal processing. We conduct extensive comparative study using real world sensor signal data, and observe superior performance of CODF when compared with state-of-the-art decision fusion methods. In addition to distributed sensor network applications, the proposed CODF algorithm can be applied to numerous multi-modality, multi-agent, multi-media signal processing problems.