Evidential Reasoning: An Implementation For Multisensor Integration

Abstract

Reasoning from uncertain, incomplete, and sometimes inaccurate information is necessary whenever any system is to interact in an intelligent way with its environment. This follows directly from the fact that understanding the world is possible only by perceiving it through a set of knowledge sources that provide partially processed sensory information. Because of the limited capabilities of any sensor, the information is inherently “evidential.” That is, perceptual information is not readily captured in terms of simple truths and falsities or in terms of probabilistic estimates, when the appropriate statistical data are lacking. Therefore, neither logical nor standard probabilistic reasoning techniques are uniformly applicable in this context.