Using Bayesian Networks to evaluate the trustworthiness of ‘2 out of 3' decision fusion mechanisms in multi-sensor applications

The use of smart-sensors to recognize automatically complex situations (anomalous behaviors, physical security threats, etc.) requires ‘intelligent’ methods to improve the trustworthiness of automatic decisions. Voting and consensus mechanisms can be employed whether supported by probabilistic formalisms to correlate event occurrence, to merge local events and to estimate the likelihood of overall decisions. This paper presents the results of a quantitative comparison of three different voting schemes based on Bayesian Networks. These models present a growing complexity and they are able to provide a trustworthiness estimation based on single nodes detection reliability in terms of false alarm probabilities.