Target Identification Based on the Transferable Belief Model Interpretation of Dempster–Shafer Model

This paper explains how multisensor data fusion and target identification can be performed within the transferable belief model (TBM), a model for the representation of quantified uncertainty based on belief functions. We present the underlying theory, in particular the general Bayesian theorem needed to transform likelihoods into beliefs and the pignistic transformation needed to build the probability measure required for decision making. We present how this method applies in practice. We compare its solution with the classical one, illustrating it with an embarrassing example, where the TBM and the probability solutions completely disagree. Computational efficiency of the belief-function solution was supposedly proved in a study that we reproduce and we show that in fact the opposite conclusions hold. The results presented here can be extended directly to many problems of data fusion and diagnosis.