The prospect of information fusion and the development background of information fusion technology

As systems become more complex, relying on a single sensor to monitor physical quantities is clearly restrictive. Therefore, multi-sensor technology is used in the fault diagnosis system to monitor a variety of characteristic quantities (such as vibration, temperature, pressure, flow, etc.), and the information of these sensors is fused to improve the accuracy and reliability of fault location. In addition, human observation is also an important source of information for troubleshooting, but this information** is often overlooked because it is difficult to quantify or not accurate enough.

The emergence of information fusion technology provides a powerful tool for solving these problems and opens up a broad prospect for the development and application of fault diagnosis. Through information fusion, the information detected by multiple sensors and the facts of manual observation can be scientifically and reasonably comprehensively processed, which can improve the intelligence of condition monitoring and fault diagnosis.

Information fusion technology was formed with the development of radar information processing and command automation systems. It is a comprehensive information processing technology about how to use information from multiple sources together to obtain a more objective and essential understanding of the same thing or goal. Information fusion in the command automation system refers to the multi-level and multi-faceted detection, association, correlation, valuation and synthesis of data and information from multiple sensors to achieve accurate status and identity estimation, as well as complete and timely situation and threat assessment.

Because the performance of various sensors is very different from each other, the measured physical quantities are different and complementary, and they can obtain more and more effective information than a single sensor by working together, which is mainly reflected in: high system reliability; greater spatial and temporal coverage; Good confidence and resolution; The dimensionality of the measurement space is increased, and the reconnaissance range is broadened; The system has strong survivability and good resistance to destruction.

With the rapid development of computer technology and communication technology, and the increasingly close integration with each other, coupled with the special and urgent needs of military applications, information fusion technology, as an emerging technology of data processing, has made amazing development in the past 10 years and has entered many military application fields.

Information fusion, also known as data fusion, can also be called sensor information fusion or multi-sensor information fusion, is an information processing process that associates, correlates and synthesizes data and information obtained from single and multiple information sources to obtain accurate location and identity estimation, as well as a comprehensive and optimal estimation of the situation and threat and its importance; This process is a continuous refinement process of estimating, evaluating and evaluating the needs of additional information sources, and it is also a process of continuous self-correction of the information processing process to obtain the improvement of the results. Information fusion technology can be summarized as the information processing process that uses computer technology to automatically analyze and synthesize the observation information of several sensors obtained in time series under certain criteria to complete the required decision-making and estimation tasks.

According to this definition, the multi-sensor system is the hardware foundation of information fusion, multi-source information is the processing object of information fusion, and coordination and optimization and comprehensive processing are the core of information fusion.

Converged communication is based on IP communication, with VoIP, first-class communication, multi-conference, collaborative office, address book and instant messaging as the core business capabilities, no matter where the user can access the network to enjoy various services of unified communication; The unified communication platform can also enable users to realize the unification of various types of communication and the unification of user experience through diversified terminals, unified control and bearer networks with IP as the core, and converged service platforms. Unified communication can adapt to the communication needs of different industries and even different enterprises, and can be combined with enterprise applications, such as integration with OA CRM systems, email and office software, and third-party applications. Converged communications have three main characteristics:

In view of the superiority of converged communication and the future development of converged communication, there are now domestic manufacturers such as ZTE, Huawei, Netjing Technology, and Netmobile Network Technology to join the R&D and production of converged communication products, which also occupy a certain market in China and break Cisco's monopoly in the international market.

For reasons of custom, much of the literature still uses data fusion. The basic principle of information fusion is: making full use of sensor resources The state refers to the rational control and use of various sensors and artificial observation information, and the complementary and redundant information of various sensors in space and time is combined according to a certain optimization criterion or algorithm to produce a consistent interpretation and description of the observation object.

The comprehensive and complete information about the object and environment obtained by using multiple sensors is mainly reflected in the fusion algorithm. Therefore, the core problem of multi-sensor systems is to select the appropriate fusion algorithm. For multi-sensor systems, information is diverse and complex, so the basic requirements for information fusion methods are robustness and parallel processing capabilities.

In addition, there is the speed and precision of the method; interface performance with the pre-processing system and the subsequent information identification system; Ability to coordinate with different technologies and methods; requirements for information samples, etc. In general, a mathematical method based on nonlinearity can be used as a fusion method if it has fault tolerance, adaptability, associative memory, and parallel processing capabilities. Although multi-sensor data fusion has not formed a complete theoretical system and effective fusion algorithm, many mature and effective fusion methods have been proposed in many application fields according to their specific application backgrounds.