Algebraic method for multisensor data fusion

In this contribution, we use Gaussian posterior probability densities to characterize local estimates from distributed sensors, and assume that they all belong to the Riemannian manifold of Gaussian distributions. Our starting point is to introduce a proper Lie algebraic structure for the Gaussian submanifold with a fixed mean vector, and then the average dissimilarity between the fused density and local posterior densities can be measured by the norm of a Lie algebraic vector. Under Gaussian assumptions, a geodesic projection based algebraic fusion method is proposed to achieve the fused density by taking the norm as the loss. It provides a robust fixed point iterative algorithm for the mean fusion with theoretical convergence, and gives an analytical form for the fused covariance matrix. The effectiveness of the proposed fusion method is illustrated by numerical examples.