General combination rules for qualitative and quantitative beliefs

Martin and Osswald \cite{Martin07} have recently proposed many generalizations of combination rules on quantitative beliefs in order to manage the conflict and to consider the specificity of the responses of the experts. Since the experts express themselves usually in natural language with linguistic labels, Smarandache and Dezert \cite{Li07} have introduced a mathematical framework for dealing directly also with qualitative beliefs. In this paper we recall some element of our previous works and propose the new combination rules, developed for the fusion of both qualitative or quantitative beliefs

AN INTELLIGENT CLASSIFIER FUSION TECHNIQUE FOR IMPROVED MULTIMODAL BIOMETRIC AUTHENTICATION USING MODIFIED DEMPSTER-SHAFER RULE OF COMBINATION

Multimodal biometric technology relatively is a technology developed to overcome those limitations imposed by unimodalbiometric systems. The paradigm consolidates evidence from multiple biometric sources offering considerableimprovements in reliability with reasonably overall performance in many applications. Meanwhile, the issue of efficient andeffective information fusion of these evidences obtained from different sources remains an obvious concept that attractsresearch attention. In this research paper, we consider a classical classifier fusion technique, Dempster’s rule of combinationproposed in Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST) of evidence. DST provides useful computational scheme for integratingaccumulative evidences and possesses the potential to update the prior every time a new data is added in the database.However, it has some shortcomings. Dempster Shafer evidence combination has this inability to respond adequately to thefusion of different basic belief assignments (bbas) of evidences, even when the level of conflict between sources is low. Italso has this tendency of completely ignoring plausibility in the measure of its belief. To solve these problems, this paperpresents a modified Dempster’s rule of combination for multimodal biometric authentication which integrates hyperbolictangent (tanh) estimators to overcome the inadequate normalization steps done in the original Dempster’s rule ofcombination. We also adopt a multi-level decision threshold to its measure of belief to model the modified Dempster Shaferrule of combination.Keywords: Information fusion, Multimodal Biometric Authentication, Normalization technique, Tanh Estimators

A Hierarchical Flexible Coarsening Method to Combine BBAs in Probabilities

In many applications involving epistemic uncertainties usually modeled by belief functions, it is often necessary to approximate general (non-Bayesian) basic belief assignments (BBAs) to subjective probabilities (called Bayesian BBAs). This necessity occurs if one needs to embed the fusion result in a system based on the probabilistic framework and Bayesian inference (e.g. tracking systems), or if one wants to use classical decision theory to make a decision. There exists already several methods (probabilistic transforms) to approximate any general BBA to a Bayesian BBA