Integrated Sensor Systems and Data Fusion for Homeland Protection

This chapter addresses the application of data and information fusion to the design of integrated systems in the Homeland Protection (HP) domain. HP is a wide and complex domain: systems in this domain are large (in terms of size and scope) integrated (each subsystem cannot be considered as an isolated system) and different in purpose. Such systems require a multidisciplinary approach for their design and analysis and they are necessarily required to provide data and information fusion in the most general sense. The first data fusion algorithms employed in real systems in the radar field go back to the early seventies; now a days new concepts have been developed and spread to be applied to very complex systems with the aim to achieve the highest level of intelligence as possible and hopefully to support decision. Data fusion is aimed to enhance situation awareness and decision making through the combination of information/data obtained by networks of homogeneous and/or heterogeneous sensors. The aim of this chapter is to give an overview of the several approaches that can be followed to design and analyze systems for homeland protection. Different fusion architectures can be drawn on the basis of the employed algorithms: they are analyzed under several aspects in this chapter. Real study cases applied to real world problems of homeland protection are provided in the chapter.