Bayesian Decision Theory

The subject of this chapter, and the one that follows it, is Bayesian decision theory and its use in multi-sensor data fusion. To make our discussion concrete we shall concentrate on the pattern recognition problem [19] in which an unknown pattern, or object, O is to be assigned to one of K possible classes {c 1, c 2, ... , c K }. In this chapter we shall limit ourselves to using a single logical sensor, or classifier, S. We shall then remove this restriction in Chapt. 14 where we consider multiple classifier systems.