A Systematic Review on Fusion Techniques and Approaches Used in Applications

Fusion technologies have rapidly evolved. These technologies are normally customized according to the needs of domains. Despite a large number of publications on intelligence fusion applications for various domains, they are scattered. The aim of this review is to present the state of the art for intelligence fusion applications within a specific domain. We identified three major domains for the purpose, namely robotics, military, and healthcare, during the initial process of the systematic review. These three domains are always in need of superior intelligence. Articles were searched mainly in IEEE Xplore. We limit the range of publications to the year 2014 to 2019, to focus on the most recent publications. We adopt the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol to screen, filter and evaluate qualities of each retrieved article. As a result, we retrieved 675 articles at the initial stage of the search, we conducted screening and filtering process and reviewed 153 articles potential articles, and finally, we excluded 36 articles as they do not comply with our quality assessment criteria. Only 117 articles are included. The results of this study are a list of classified applications within the domains and a number of relevant techniques or approaches used in each classified application. The finding of this review showed that the most published works for the use of intelligence fusion are mainly applications in the robotics domain, where mostly used techniques are Kalman Filter and its variants. Outcomes of this study can be a guideline or an insight for researchers to further develop and implement in this field.