Improved Data Fusion Techniques for Space-Based Remote Sensing

The Open Voxel Fusion Engine (OpenVFE) microservice solves the geometric aspects of correlating and fusing sensor observations from heterogenous sensor types, provides application programming interfaces (APIs) for integrating additional sensor inputs and data fusion routines (called fusion handlers), and integrates free and open source (FOSS) software components for improved message routing and queueing. By separating the purely mathematical and computer science aspects of fusion (implemented in OpenVFE) from the physics-based aspects (implemented within fusion handlers), Cosmic AES provides an extensible, scalable, and modular approach to sensor fusion. Due to the fusion handlers being implemented external to the microservice, third-party developers can implement them to better accommodate issues of proprietary or classified sensor parameters. To make correlation and fusion of sensor observations more efficient, OpenVFE implements a sparse voxel octree (SVO) to only compare observations which are local to each other; by reducing the number of comparisons which occur, the system is more tolerant to the growing number of sensors and increasing sensor fidelity.