Multi-sensor data fusion based on the belief divergence measure of evidences and the belief entropy

Abstract

Multi-sensor data fusion technology plays an important role in real applications. Because of the flexibility and effectiveness in modeling and processing the uncertain information regardless of prior probabilities, Dempster–Shafer evidence theory is widely applied in a variety of fields of information fusion. However, counter-intuitive results may come out when fusing the highly conflicting evidences. In order to deal with this problem, a novel method for multi-sensor data fusion based on a new belief divergence measure of evidences and the belief entropy was proposed. First, a new Belief Jensen–Shannon divergence is devised to measure the discrepancy and conflict degree between the evidences; then, the credibility degree can be obtained to represent the reliability of the evidences. Next, considering the uncertainties of the evidences, the information volume of the evidences are measured by making use of the belief entropy to indicate the relative importance of the evidences. Afterwards, the credibility degree of each evidence is modified by taking advantage of the quantitative information volume which will be utilized to obtain an appropriate weight in terms of each evidence. Ultimately, the final weights of the evidences are applied to adjust the bodies of the evidences before using the Dempster’s combination rule. A numerical example is illustrated that the proposed method is feasible and effective in handling the conflicting evidences, where the belief value of target increases to 99.05%. Furthermore, an application in fault diagnosis is given to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method outperforms other related methods where the basic belief assignment (BBA) of the true target is 89.73%.