Cognitive information fusion of georeferenced data for tactical applications

Georeferenced data from multiple autonomous sources for defined AOI (areas of interest) can be fused and analyzed in support of various decision-making processes such as risk assessment, emergency response, situation awareness and tactical planning. However, data from multiple heterogeneous sources may be in different formats, scales, qualities and coverage. All these characteristics of multi-source spatial data limit the use of traditional statistics methods for information fusion. In this paper, the cognitive belief is proposed to represent georeferenced data from different sources. Uncertainty caused by inaccurate or partial information can be modeled. By applying the belief combination rule, cognitive beliefs can be fused to provide better support for decision makers.