Basic Research for Level 2 Information Fusion

The proposed effort will address fundamental issues in the research and development of Level 2 fusion, namely, development of a solid mathematical foundation on which to build algorithms for situation refinement that includes organization and structure.We believe that the fundamental approach to fusion in Level 1 - that is, detection, prediction, association, hypothesis generation, hypothesis management, and update - is applicable to Level 2. Examining the key elements of Level 1 fusion, we can identifythe parallel components of Level 2 fusion and evaluate the degree of development in the underlying fundamental theory. The area that provides the greatest hope for innovative research is in the development of metrics for working with discrete sets thatrepresent Level 2 objects. Our research will be performed in the setting of discrete sets (Organization and Structure) and will be aimed at the development of metrics that measure the distance (or