A new adaptive decentralized soft decision combining rule for distributed sensor systems with data fusion

• A new adaptive decentralized soft decision combining rule is proposed.
• It fuses soft decisions of sensors rather than hard decisions of sensors.
• It does not require the knowledge of the sensors false alarm and detection probabilities.
• Performance comparisons with other approaches are illustrated.
• The results indicated that the proposed approach is very efficient.

A new adaptive decentralized soft decision combining rule for multiple-sensor distributed detection systems with data fusion is proposed. Unlike previously published rules, the proposed combining rule fuses soft decisions of sensors rather than hard decisions of sensors and does not require the knowledge of the false alarm and detection probabilities of the distributed sensors. Such a fusion rule is adaptive, insensitive to the instabilities of the sensor thresholds, and has the advantage of soft decision fusion. The proposed combination rule is derived: (1) for the case where the fusion center estimates the error probabilities of the sensors and (2) for the case where the fusion center does not estimate the error probabilities of the sensors. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated, and illustrative examples are presented in the cases of Gaussian and Rayleigh distributed observations. Comparisons with the optimum centralized fusion, the optimum soft decision fusion, a soft decision fusion approach based on fusing confidence levels, and the optimum decentralized hard decision fusion are also presented. The results indicate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the optimum decentralized hard decision fusion, is better than the approach based on fusing confidence levels, and has a performance similar to that of the optimum soft decision fusion.