Scalable Information Fusion: Adaptivity for Complex Environments and Secure Data

人类操作员或服务人员的视觉分析被广泛认为受益于融合表示，其中来自不同光谱波段的图像或视频信息被组合到单个表示中。为了提供最大的效用，融合数据或其组成部分必须及时传送，必须便于简单和灵活的处理，并且必须对丢失和网络拥塞具有健壮性。基于非基础设施的移动自组织网络正在成为适合交换和融合实时多传感器内容的平台。这种网络的特征是传输路径的高度动态行为和高路径中断概率。它们体现了未来军事场景中常见的复杂、不同种类的端到端传输环境。许多传感器网络中物理信道的低带宽、噪声特性代表了未来数字战场实施的最严重挑战。在这种复杂的网络环境中，关键挑战之一是需要可靠地传输和融合实时视频。视频被认为本质上很难传输，而且需要支持多个来源，以帮助融合和态势感知，同时维护数据安全，这一点更加复杂。我们的工作将集中在嵌入式视频比特流(MPEG-4(SVC))上，它提供了可伸缩性和增强的灵活性，可以适应不同的频道类型、干扰级别、网络结构和内容类型。提出了一种多源视频流传输方法，该方法将以带宽高效的方式支持视频融合，同时有可能显著提高复杂异质网络中实时传输的健壮性。信源编码和融合将基于使用嵌入比特流的可伸缩性的概念。这意味着信源只需要被编码一次，并且编码的表示可以被截断以支持多种不同的终端类型，并且在没有反馈的情况下提供固有的拥塞管理。这样的系统必须被设计成在存在比特流截断的情况下保持最佳的融合性能，从而保持可理解性。该方案的潜在优势包括：-支持无损和有损表示的可伸缩融合和压缩的联合框架。-根据内容类型和应用进行优化的灵活性。-优雅降级：融合的视频比特流适应不同终端类型和动态网络条件的能力。-容错性：码流的结构可以帮助后续纠错系统减轻灾难性的解码失败。-安全传送：设计支持截断的加密方案的能力。-感兴趣区域编码：支持优先传输的ROI的定义。

Visual analysis by human operators or service personnel is widely acknowledged to benefit from a fused representation, where images or video information from different spectral bands are combined into a single representation. To provide maximum utility fused data, or its constituent components, must be delivered in a timely manner, must facilitate simple and flexible processing and must be robust to loss and network congestion.Non infrastructure-based Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks are emerging as suitable platforms for exchanging and fusing real-time multi-sensor content. Such networks are characterised by the highly dynamic behaviour of the transmission routes and high path outage probabilities. They exemplify the type of complex, heterogeneous end-end transmission environments which will be commonly encountered in future military scenarios. The low-bandwidth, noisy nature of the physical channel in many sensor networks represents the most serious challenge to implementation of the digital battlefield of the future. One of the key challenges in such complex networking environments is the need to reliably transport and fuse real time video. Video is acknowledged to be inherently difficult to transmit and this is compounded by the need to support multiple sources to aid fusion and situational awareness while maintaining data security. We will focus our work on embedded video bitstreams (MPEG-4 (SVC) which offer scalability and enhanced flexibility for adaptation to varying channel types, interference levels, network structures and content types. These mitigate the need for highly inefficient video transrating processes and instead present a more tractable requirement in the form of dynamic bitstream management.A multisource approach to streaming is proposed which will support video fusion in a bandwidth-efficient manner while having the potential to significantly increase the robustness of real-time transmission in complex heterogeneous networks. Source coding and fusion will be based on the concept of scalability using an embedded bitstream. This means that the source need only be encoded once and that the coded representation can be truncated to support multiple diverse terminal types and to provide inherent congestion management without feedback. Such a system must be designed to maintain optimum fusion performance and hence intelligibility in the presence of bitstream truncation. The potential advantages of this scheme include:- A joint framework for scalable fusion and compression supporting both lossless and lossy representations. - Flexibility for optimisation depending on content type and application.- Graceful degradation: the capability of the fused video bitstream to adapt to differing terminal types and dynamic network conditions - Error resilience: the structure of the code stream can aid subsequent error correction systems alleviating catastrophic decoding failures.- Secure delivery: the ability to design encryption schemes which support truncation.- Region-of-Interest coding: supporting definition of ROIs for priority transmission.