Data Fusion

Wireless distributed microsensor systems will enable the reliable monitoring of a variety of environments for both civil and military applications. In this paper, we look at communication protocols, which can have significant impact on the overall energy dissipation of these networks. Based on our findings that the conventional protocols of direct transmission, minimum-transmission-energy, multi-hop routing, and static clustering may not be optimal for sensor networks, we propose LEACH (Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy), a clustering-based protocol that utilizes randomized rotation of local cluster based station (cluster-heads) to evenly distribute the energy load among the sensors in the network. LEACH uses localized coordination to enable scalability and robustness for dynamic networks, and incorporates data fusion into the routing protocol to reduce the amount of information that must be transmitted to the base station. Simulations show the LEACH can achieve as much as a factor of 8 reduction in energy dissipation compared with conventional outing protocols. In addition, LEACH is able to distribute energy dissipation evenly throughout the sensors, doubling the useful system lifetime for the networks we simulated.

Validation of a novel gene expression signature in independent data sets is a critical step in the development of a clinically useful test for cancer patient risk-stratification. However, validation is often unconvincing because the size of the test set is typically small. To overcome this problem we used publicly available breast cancer gene expression data sets and a novel approach to data fusion, in order to validate a new breast tumor intrinsic list. A 105-tumor training set containing 26 sample pairs was used to derive a new breast tumor intrinsic gene list. This intrinsic list contained 1300 genes and a proliferation signature that was not present in previous breast intrinsic gene sets. We tested this list as a survival predictor on a data set of 311 tumors compiled from three independent microarray studies that were fused into a single data set using Distance Weighted Discrimination. When the new intrinsic gene set was used to hierarchically cluster this combined test set, tu...

Independent component analysis (ICA) has become an increasingly utilized approach for analyzing brain imaging data. In contrast to the widely used general linear model (GLM) that requires the user to parameterize the data (e.g. the brain’s response to stimuli), ICA, by relying upon a general assumption of independence, allows the user to be agnostic regarding the exact form of the response. In addition, ICA is intrinsically a multivariate approach, and hence each component provides a grouping of brain activity into regions that share the same response pattern thus providing a natural measure of functional connectivity. There are a wide variety of ICA approaches that have been proposed, in this paper we focus upon two distinct methods. The first part of this paper reviews the use of ICA for making group inferences from fMRI data. We provide an overview of current approaches for utilizing ICA to make group inferences with a focus upon the group ICA approach implemented in the GIFT software. In the next part of this paper, we provide an overview of the use of ICA to combine or fuse multimodal data. ICA has proven particularly useful for data fusion of multiple tasks or data modalities such as single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data or event-related potentials. As demonstrated by a number of examples in this paper, ICA is a powerful and versatile data-driven approach for studying the brain.

I. THE NEED FOR CONCEPT AND TERMS OF REFERENCE THE concept of data fusion is easy to understand. How-ever, its exact meaning varies from one scientist to another. Several words have appeared, such as merging, com-bination, synergy, and integration. All of them ...

In literature, several methods are available to combine both low spatial multispectral and low spectral panchromatic resolution images to obtain a high resolution multispectral image. One of the most common problems encountered in these methods is spectral distortions introduced during the merging process. At the same time, the spectral quality of the image is the most important factor affecting the accuracy of the results in many applications such as object recognition, object extraction, image analysis. In this study, the most commonly used methods including GIHS, GIHSF, PCA and Wavelet are analyzed using image quality metrics such as SSIM, ERGAS and SAM. At the same time, Wavelet is the best method for obtaining the fused image having the least spectral distortions according to obtained results. At the same time, image quality of GIHS, GIHSF and PCA methods are close to each other, but spatial qualities of the fused image using the wavelet method are less than others.

Land vehicles rely mainly on global positioning system (GPS) to provide their position with consistent accuracy. However, GPS receivers may encounter frequent GPS outages within urban areas where satellite signals are blocked. In order to overcome this problem, GPS is usually combined with inertial sensors mounted inside the vehicle to obtain a reliable navigation solution, especially during GPS outages. This letter proposes a data fusion technique based on radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) that integrates GPS with inertial sensors in real time. A field test data was used to examine the performance of the proposed data fusion module and the results discuss the merits and the limitations of the proposed technique.