Self-Organizing Hierarchical Knowledge Discovery by an ARTMAP Image Fusion System

Classifying novel terrain or objects front sparse, complex data may require the resolution of conflicting information from sensors working at different times, locations, and scales, and from sources with different goals and situations. Information fusion methods can help resolve inconsistencies, as when evidence variously suggests that an object's class is car, truck, or airplane. The methods described here consider a complementary problem, supposing that information from sensors and experts is reliable though inconsistent, as when evidence suggests that an object's class is car, vehicle, and man-made. Underlying relationships among objects are assumed to be unknown to the automated system or the human user. The ARTMAP information fusion system used distributed code representations that exploit the neural network's capacity for one-to-many learning in order to produce self-organizing expert systems that discover hierarchical knowledge structures. The system infers multi-level relationships among groups of output classes, without any supervised labeling of these relationships.

Air Force Office of Scientific Research (F49620-01-1-0397, AFOSR F49620-01-1-0423); Office of Naval Research (N00014-01-1-0624); National Imagery and Mapping Agency and the National Science Foundation for Siegfried Martens (NMA501-03-1-2030, DGE-0221680); Department of Homeland Security