A method and apparatus for the generic extraction and compression of surveillance information that facilitates high performance data fusion in distributed sensor systems. According to the method, multiple sensors (120[1] . . . 120[N]), distributed over a wide surveillance area (100), sense surveillance data of interest (310), optionally filter that sensed data (340), extract non-essential data (360) from the filtered data, compress in a manner specific to the extracted data (370) the extracted data for transmission and subsequently transmit (380) the compressed data to a “master” processing system (220) for integration/fusion with other transmitted compressed data streams originating from other sensors. Reductions in required data transmitted is on the order of 100:1.