Context-based Information Fusion: A survey and discussion

• Historical analysis of the evolution of context-based approaches in different research communities.
• Survey and discussion of context representation and techniques in mobile and pervasive computing, image processing, AI.
• Survey and discussion of context-based approaches in Information Fusion from a JDL perspective.
• Discussion and insights on key context concepts across different domains and their impacts on fusion systems.
• Proposal of novel architectural design aspects for context-aware fusion systems.

This survey aims to provide a comprehensive status of recent and current research on context-based Information Fusion (IF) systems, tracing back the roots of the original thinking behind the development of the concept of “context”. It shows how its fortune in the distributed computing world eventually permeated in the world of IF, discussing the current strategies and techniques, and hinting possible future trends. IF processes can represent context at different levels (structural and physical constraints of the scenario, a priori known operational rules between entities and environment, dynamic relationships modelled to interpret the system output, etc.). In addition to the survey, several novel context exploitation dynamics and architectural aspects peculiar to the fusion domain are presented and discussed.