This paper proposes a new solution for reducing the number of sources of evidence to be combined in order to diminish the complexity of the fusion process required in some applications where the real-time constraint and strong computing resource limitation are of prime importance. The basic idea consists in selecting, among the whole set of sources of evidence, only the biggest subset of sources which are not too contradicting based on a criterion of Evidence Supporting Measure of Similarity (ESMS) in order to process solely the coherent information received. The ESMS criterion serves actually as a generic tool for outlier source identification and rejection. Since the ESMS between several belief functions can be defined using several distance measures, we browse the most common ones in this paper and we describe in detail the principle of our Generalized Fusion Machine (GFM). The last part of the paper shows the improvement of the performances of this new approach with respect to the classical one in a real-data based and real-time experiment for robot perception using sonar sensors.
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