Fusion technologies for drug interdiction

Data for drug interdiction comes from multiple sources including sensors such as radar and infrared and databases from law enforcement agencies and customs service. These sensors and sources are controlled by different government agencies and sometimes involve more than one country. In order to provide information for detection, tracking, intercept and apprehension, data from these disparate sources need to be fused. This paper describes a distributed architecture that can support fusion for drug interdiction and relevant fusion technologies. The architecture consists of multiple platforms/processing sites cooperating with each other. Each site has its own sensors or data sources and fuses (processes) the local data to perform its own functions. Since a single site may not have all the needed information to detect and track drug related traffic, different sites or platforms exchange data with each other to perform distributed fusion. Relevant fusion technologies for drug interdiction including all-source fusion, distributed fusion and sensor resource management are discussed