Information fusion in image understanding

Computer vision and image understanding processes are not very robust; small changes in exposure parameters or in internal parameters of algorithms can lead to significantly different results. A combination (fusion) of these results is profitable. The authors introduce an extended fusion concept dealing with different sources of information at external (world, scene, image) and internal (image description, scene description) levels and define the process of fusion. Each level requires its own procedure of quality measure and information fusion in order to yield a combination of components from several sources. Related work in the field is reviewed. Examples from the authors´ own work cover remote sensing (improvement of classification results by fusion at the image level), medical image processing of ocular fundus images (automatic control point selection by fusion at the image description level) and the interpretation of Billard scenes (object identification by fusion at the scene description level)