Self-organizing information fusion and hierarchical knowledge discovery: a new framework using ARTMAP neural networks

Classifying novel terrain or objects from sparse, complex data may require the resolution of conflicting information from sensors working at different times, locations, and scales, and from sources with different goals and situations. Information fusion methods can help resolve inconsistencies, as when evidence variously suggests that an object's class is car, truck, or airplane. The methods described here address a complementary problem, supposing that information from sensors and experts is reliable though inconsistent, as when evidence suggests that an object's class is car, vehicle, and man-made. Underlying relationships among classes are assumed to be unknown to the automated system or the human user. The ARTMAP information fusion system uses distributed code representations that exploit the neural network's capacity for one-to-many learning in order to produce self-organizing expert systems that discover hierarchical knowledge structures. The fusion system infers multi-level relationships among groups of output classes, without any supervised labeling of these relationships. The procedure is illustrated with two image examples, but is not limited to the image domain.