IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2016 - 6
IMAGES LICENSED BY INGRAM PUBLISHING
Data Fusion and
Remote Sensing
An ever-growing
relationship
mICHAEL SCHmITT AND XIAO XIANG ZHU
C
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MGRS.2016.2561021
Date of publication: 16 December 2016
is in some sense better than what could have been achieved
without this combination is a widely discussed topic in many
disciplines. Some scholars suggest that there is a subtle difference between the aforementioned terms. According to
Gustafsson [55], information fusion is mostly used in information theory or artificial intelligence and aims at fusing
information that cannot always be represented by real numbers. In contrast, sensor fusion combines data from different
sensors on an intermediate level, and data fusion merges numerical data from multiple sources closer to the raw sensor
data. In the context of remote sensing, the simple term data
fusion is usually used, although sometimes this term extended to sensor data fusion if data from different sensor types are
used, and sometimes this is termed image fusion if only twodimensional images are combined. In any case, fusion is a
crucial topic in a scientific field where the variety of exploited
sensors ranges throughout most of the electromagnetic spectrum, includes both active and passive sensing technologies,
comprises resolutions from the micrometer level to the kilometer level, and is used in applications from geological
deformation monitoring to biomass estimation and urbanarea reconstruction.
0274-6638/16©2016IEEE
ieee Geoscience and remote sensinG maGazine
haracterized by a certain focus on the heavily discussed
topic of image fusion in its beginnings, sensor data
fusion has played a significant role in the remote sensing
research community for a long time. With this article, we
aim to provide a short overview of established definitions,
targeting a generalized understanding of the topic. In addition, a review of the state of the art of remote sensing data
fusion research is given. By bringing together the conventional view expressed in the classical data fusion community and a review of current activities in the field of Earth
observation, this article provides a holistic view of generic
data fusion concepts and their applicability to the remote
sensing domain.
kEY TERMINOLOGY
Data fusion, sensor fusion, information fusion, sensor data
fusion, or simply fusion-no matter which specific term is
used, the science of combining measurements, signals, or
observations from different sources to obtain a result that
6
DECEmbEr 2016
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