The understanding and principled exploitation of context in Information Fusion (IF) systems is still rather limited. Domain knowledge has been traditionally acquired ad hoc from experts or static archives and applied to stove-piped solutions that could hardly scale or adapt to new conditions. However, “context”, considered as locally relevant (and possibly dynamic) domain knowledge, should play a key role at any level of a modern fusion system to gain adaptability and improved performance.
Following the positive response that special sessions on context-based IF at the International conference on Information Fusion have received in the past few years, this special issue aims at providing an outlook on current research, bringing together papers covering many aspects of the inclusion of contextual elements at different levels of the fusion process.
