Visual programming environment for multisensor data fusion

In recent years, numerous multisensor data fusion systems have been developed for a wide variety of applications. Defense related applications include; automatic target recognition systems, identification-friend-foe-neutral, automated situation assessment and threat assessment systems, and systems for smart weapons. Non-defense applications include; robotics, condition-based maintenance, environmental monitoring, and medical diagnostics. For each of these applications, multiple sensor data are combined to achieve inferences which are not generally possible using only a single sensor. Implementation of these data fusion systems often involves a significant amount of effort. In particular, software must be developed for components such as data base access, human computer interfaces and displays, communication software, and data fusion algorithms. While commercial software packages exist to assist development of data bases, communications, and human computer interfaces, there are no general purpose packages available to support the implementation of the data fusion algorithms. This paper describes a visual programming tool developed to assist in rapid prototyping of data fusion systems. This toolkit is modeled after the popular tool, Khoros, used by the image processing community. The tool described here is written in visual C, and provides the capability to rapidly implement and apply data fusion algorithms. An application to condition based maintenance is described.