Editorial: Introduction to the Special Issue
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This special issue includes a total of seven papers that were selected after a rigorous refereeing process from submissions solicited from the research community comprising the Defence Technology Centre on Data and Information Fusion (DIF-DTC) that includes teams from several UK companies and eight UK universities. These papers illustrate two complementary aspects of the research conducted within the DIF-DTC. On the one hand, this national programme brings together teams of researchers and industrial participants so as to address problem areas and systems of practical importance through a coordinated research effort, and through the construction of demonstrators, which serve to illustrate and evaluate a coordinated set of research activities. The second important aspect of the DIF-DTC is the existence within this framework, of many deep research contributions, which contribute significant technical input to the broader agenda. Thus, this special issue includes papers that describe the objectives and progress made with two of the DIF-DTC’s broad-based but well-focused ‘cluster projects’, followed by five papers that describe specific research contributions. In ‘Hyperion—Next-Generation Battlespace Information Services’, the team of authors from major UK industrial organizations lead by BT, with QinetiQ and General Dynamics UK Ltd, together with academics from Imperial College and the University of Southampton, examine the manner in which resilient information technology infrastructures can be designed and constructed for tactical environments in which large numbers of events occur rapidly, and where the networked information system itself may come under attack. The paper ‘Applied Multi-Dimensional Fusion’ displays work in a Cluster Project that includes teams lead by General Dynamics UK Ltd, together with the Universities of Bristol and Cambridge and Imperial College. It addresses data fusion problems that are applied specifically to the image domain, and that are of use in defence applications for Intelligence Surveillance Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance (ISTAR). Thus, this paper also showcases the practical value of research done in the UK on multi-dimensional image processing. These first two papers are then followed by contributions that deal with specific research issues that are addressed in several academic projects. The work on ‘Joint Fusion and Blind Restoration for Multiple Image Scenarios with Missing Data’ by researchers at Imperial College links directly to the previous paper by showing how one can combine spatial domain fusion and restoration of images in order to identify degraded feature in the fused image and enhance their content with a regularized restoration technique. The paper on ‘Multitarget Initiation, Tracking and Termination Using Bayesian Monte Carlo Methods’ from the Engineering Department at the University of Cambridge discusses the important problem of tracking multiple objects with multiple sensors. The proposed approach includes the use of Markov random field techniques to model the motion of distinct objects, and helps avoid the confusion that arises when different motion streams are thought to be part of the same object’s motion pattern. The next paper on ‘Influencing Cognitive Strategy by Manipulating Information Access’ by researchers from Cardiff University, addresses the very important area of information overload for people who supervise and operate complex computer-assisted real-time processes. The authors demonstrate the balance that must be achieved between the amount of information that is offered to the operator and the complexity of the task that the operator has to undertake, since both of these will simultaneously tax the operator’s cognitive and visual capacities. The following paper on ‘AKTiveSA: A Technical Demonstrator System for Enhanced Situation Awareness in Military Operations other than War’ is written by a team from the University of Southampton, and describes some innovative concepts concerning the manner in which relevant items of information coming from different sources and having different representations can be integrated into a single system which has a focused area of application. This paper also serves, in a way, as an example of yet another type of complex scenario that may be relevant to the study conducted in the previous paper. Finally, a paper by researchers at Imperial College on ‘A Denial of