Fusion Channels: A Multi-sensor Data Fusion Architecture

Due to the falling price and availability of sensors, information capture and processing at a realtime or soft realtime rate is emerging as a dominating application space. This class includes interactive multimedia, robotics, security and surveillance applications and many more. A common denominator of these applications is fusion of data gathered by various sensors and data aggregators. In this paper we propose a Data Fusion architecture, specically geared toward such multi-sensor data fusion applications and report on the prototype we have built. Our infrastructure provides a programming abstraction that offers programming ease, at the same time provides built-in optimizations that are quite complicated to implement from scratch. We show the ease of programming through two sample applications and also demonstrate through various experiments that our system has low over- head and offers better performance compared to otherwise naively written fusion routines. We also demonstrate improved scalability.