Fuzzy logic-based data integration: theory and applications

Multisensor systems provide a purposeful description of the environment that a single sensor cannot offer. Because observations provided by sensors are uncertain and incomplete, we adopt the use of fuzzy sets theory as a general framework to combine uncertain measurements. We develop a fusion formula based on the measure of fuzziness. The fusion formula is mathematically tested against several desirable properties of fusion operators. We establish a fuzzification scheme by which different types of input data would be modeled. A defuzzification scheme is carried out to recover crisp data from the combined fuzzy assessment. This approach is implemented and tested with real range and intensity images acquired by an Odetics Laser Range Scanner. The goal is to obtain better scene descriptions through a segmentation process of both images. A method for evaluating segmentation results is presented