On Integrating Human Decisions with Physical Sensors for Binary Decision Making

Thakshila Wimalajeewa, Pramod K. Varshney, Muralidhar Rangaswamy

Research output: Chapter in Book/Entry/PoemConference contribution

9 Scopus citations

Abstract

Allowing humans to act as soft sensors is increasingly becoming an attractive solution to enhance decision making performance when the available physical (hard) sensors are limited. While the fusion problem with hard data has a rich history, fusion of hard and soft data requires further understanding due to human related factors associated with human sensor data. In this work, we investigate how the presence of human sensors can be modeled in the statistical signal processing framework and the factors that need to be taken into account when integrating soft human sensor data with hard data in a signal detection framework. We consider two cases. In the first case, both types of sensors are assumed to make threshold based individual decisions using identical observations. While physical sensors use a fixed threshold, the thresholds used by human sensors are assumed to be random variables. With a given distribution for the random thresholds used at the human sensors, by properly designing the thresholds at the physical sensors, an enhanced detection performance can be observed in the integrated system compared to performing fusion with only physical sensors. In the second case, we evaluate the fusion performance when human sensors possess some side information regarding the phenomenon in addition to the common observations available at the two types of sensors.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2018 21st International Conference on Information Fusion, FUSION 2018
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages1018-1025
Number of pages8
ISBN (Print)9780996452762
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 5 2018
Event21st International Conference on Information Fusion, FUSION 2018 - Cambridge, United Kingdom
Duration: Jul 10 2018Jul 13 2018

Publication series

Name2018 21st International Conference on Information Fusion, FUSION 2018

Other

Other21st International Conference on Information Fusion, FUSION 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityCambridge
Period7/10/187/13/18

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Signal Processing
  • Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty
  • Instrumentation

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