{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,2]],"date-time":"2026-07-02T04:05:21Z","timestamp":1782965121422,"version":"3.54.5"},"reference-count":34,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"3","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,2]],"date-time":"2026-02-02T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1769990400000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["92571201"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["92571201"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["62273074"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["62273074"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/100012542","name":"Sichuan Provincial Science and Technology Support Program","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["2024NSFJQ0015"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2024NSFJQ0015"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/100012542","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Sensors"],"abstract":"<jats:p>During on-orbit service, spacecraft are subjected to hypervelocity impacts (HVIs) from micrometeoroids and space debris, causing diverse damage types that challenge structural health assessment. Unimodal approaches often struggle with similar damage patterns due to mechanical noise and imaging distance variations. To overcome these physical limitations, this study proposes a physics-informed multimodal fusion framework. Innovatively, we integrate a distance-aware infrared enhancement strategy with vibration spectral subtraction to align heterogeneous data qualities while employing a dual-stream ResNet coupled with Dempster\u2013Shafer (D-S) evidence theory to rigorously resolve inter-modal conflicts at the decision level. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed strategy achieves a mean accuracy of 99.01%, significantly outperforming unimodal baselines (92.96% and 97.11%). Notably, the fusion mechanism corrects specific misclassifications in micro-cracks and perforation, ensuring a precision exceeding 96.9% across all categories with high stability (standard deviation 0.74%). These findings validate the efficacy of multimodal fusion for precise on-orbit damage assessment, offering a robust solution for spacecraft structural health monitoring.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/s26030969","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,3]],"date-time":"2026-02-03T12:46:11Z","timestamp":1770122771000},"page":"969","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["A Multi-Modal Decision-Level Fusion Framework for Hypervelocity Impact Damage Classification in Spacecraft"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"26","author":[{"given":"Kuo","family":"Zhang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Automation Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-2852-6982","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Chun","family":"Yin","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Automation Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Pengju","family":"Kuang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Xuegang","family":"Huang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"National Key Laboratory of Aerospace Physics in Fluids, Mianyang 621000, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Xiao","family":"Peng","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"National Key Laboratory of Aerospace Physics in Fluids, Mianyang 621000, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,2]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1864","DOI":"10.1016\/j.dt.2020.11.005","article-title":"Research and development on hypervelocity impact protection using Whipple shield: An overview","volume":"17","author":"Wen","year":"2021","journal-title":"Def. 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