Book: Intelligent Systems – Fusion, Tracking and Control

I have read this book quite a few times the past 6 years or so. That’s why I decided to write a review here in my blog to let other people who might be interested know about it.



Title: Intelligent Systems – Fusion, Tracking and Control
Author: Gee Wah Ng

Part I
Chapter 1: Quest to Build Intelligent Systems
This is nothing more than an introduction chapter that identifies the need and motivation behind intelligent systems. It then moves to actual working intelligent systems that are already implemented an used in real world applications. Finally, it goes through the difficulties of building such a system.

Chapter 2: Software Design for Intelligent Systems
Although this chapter isn’t as technical as all of us would wish, it deals with exactly what its title says. That is designing software. This implies UML representations, data structures and agent-based system specific information. In my opinion this is a very compact chapter that doesn’t contain much information but it’s a nice starting point.

Chapter 3: Biologically Inspired Algorithms
This is the most common subject among evolutionary computing circles. That’s why it’s one of the very first of this book too. As you might have guessed, after a brief historical and biological perspective of the field, it introduces us to such algorithms starting from genetic algorithms, neural networks, learning algorithms for artificial neural networks, fuzzy logic etc. It’s a very nice chapter for getting to know these technologies but nothing really advanced. It ends up with expert systems and fusion of biologically inspired algorithms.

Chapter 4: Sensing Systems for Intelligent Processing
Personally, this is my favorite chapter. It begins with radar systems dealing with sensor systems such as moving target indicator, Doppler radar, millimeter-wave radar etc. and then moves to electro-optic and acoustic/sonar systems. Finally, it goes through magnetic and chemical sensors to finally discuss the design issues behind such systems.

Part II
Chapter 5: Fusion Systems for Intelligent Processing
This is the most detailed chapter of the book starting with general concepts on fusion systems and moving on to more specific topics like levels of fusion process, fusing multiple sources, cognitive intelligence, etc. It then explains architecture concepts as well as techniques for data and information fusion. It’s a very interesting chapter.

Chapter 6: How to Associate Data?
Based on the previous chapters, this one deals with the importance of data association and methods to perform this. Numerous issues are described by the author including nearest neighbour, multiple hypotheses, probabilistic and graph-based data association, etc. The chapter ends with biologically inspired algorithms in data association.

Chapter 7: Aspects of Target Tracking
This chapter begins from zero explaining everything from the essentials of tracking process to problem formulation and various filters. Next, it moves to more difficult subjects that use multiple models and concludes with the issues affecting such systems.

Chpater 8: Cooperative Intelligence
Once again, after getting to know the basics of cooperative intelligence, the author dives into the details of sensing and tracking issues as well as measurement and information fusion. One of the neat parts of this book is the scenario demonstrated in the experiments on decentralized tracking provided in this chapter.

Chapter 9: Sensor Management and Control
This is nothing more than a series of techniques for sensor management from theoretical to practical level giving some nice examples based on the knowledge acquired from the previous chapters.

So, it’s a nice book for people with no prior knowledge of such systems or for others that might want to have a general idea behind these technologies. However, if you want something really deep and specific this is not the book you’re looking for. It’s well written and chapters can even be read separately although it has some flow which makes it not that ideal option for a reference book.