Qualitative analysis and quantified evaluation of information fusion efficiency in multi-sensor systems

The theorem of information fusion efficiency in multi-sensor systems is analyzed and proved. An index, efficiency, is proposed in this paper to evaluate the performance of information fusion in multi-sensor systems. The proposed method can quantitatively evaluate the efficiency of information fusion, with the consideration of fusion algorithms, information selection, correlation between input and output information, and fusion structure. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated by its successful application if the information fusion of two real water-quality monitoring Systems. Input multi-information correlated with output information can improve the fusion efficiency, fusion systems based on different fusion algorithms can have different fusion efficiency, accordingly, efficiency index also has differ.