Advances in Multi-Sensor Data Fusion: Algorithms and Applications

With the development of satellite and remote sensing techniques, more and more image data from airborne/satellite sensors have become available. Multi-sensor image fusion seeks to combine information from different images to obtain more inferences than can be derived from a single sensor. In image-based application fields, image fusion has emerged as a promising research area since the end of the last century. The paper presents an overview of recent advances in multi-sensor satellite image fusion. Firstly, the most popular existing fusion algorithms are introduced, with emphasis on their recent improvements. Advances in main applications fields in remote sensing, including object identification, classification, change detection and maneuvering targets tracking, are described. Both advantages and limitations of those applications are then discussed. Recommendations are addressed, including: (1) Improvements of fusion algorithms; (2) Development of “algorithm fusion” methods; (3) Establishment of an automatic quality assessment scheme

Detection of leaf structures in close-range hyperspectral images using morphological fusion

Close-range hyperspectral images are a promising source of information in plant biology, in particular, for in vivo study of physiological changes. In this study, we investigate how data fusion can improve the detection of leaf elements by combining pixel reflectance and morphological information. The detection of image regions associated to the leaf structures is the first step toward quantitative analysis on the physical effects that genetic manipulation, disease infections, and environmental conditions have in plants. We tested our fusion approach on Musa acuminata (banana) leaf images and compared its discriminant capability to similar techniques used in remote sensing. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of our fusion approach, with significant improvements over some conventional methods

Improving image classification in a complex wetland ecosystem through image fusion techniques

The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of image fusion techniques on vegetation classification accuracies in a complex wetland system. Fusion of panchromatic (PAN) and multispectral (MS) Quickbird satellite imagery was undertaken using four image fusion techniques: Brovey, hue-saturation-value (HSV), principal components (PC), and Gram– Schmidt (GS) spectral sharpening. These four fusion techniques were compared in terms of their mapping accuracy to a normal MS image using maximum-likelihood classification(MLC) and support vector machine (SVM) methods. Gram–Schmidt fusion technique yielded the highest overall accuracy and kappa value with both MLC (67.5% and 0.63, respectively) and SVM methods (73.3% and 0.68, respectively). This compared favorably with the accuracies achieved using the MS image. Overall, improvements of 4.1%, 3.6%, 5.8%, 5.4%, and 7.2% in overall accuracies were obtained in case of SVM over MLC for Brovey, HSV, GS, PC, and MS images, respectively. Visual and statistical analyses of the fused images showed that the Gram–Schmidt spectral sharpening technique preserved spectral quality much better than the principal component, Brovey, and HSV fused images. Other factors, such as the growth stage of species and the presence of extensive background water in many parts of the study area, had an impact on classification accuracies

Target-adaptive CNN-based pansharpening

We recently proposed a convolutional neural network (CNN) for remote sensing image pansharpening obtaining a significant performance gain over the state of the art. In this paper, we explore a number of architectural and training variations to this baseline, achieving further performance gains with a lightweight network which trains very fast. Leveraging on this latter property, we propose a target-adaptive usage modality which ensures a very good performance also in the presence of a mismatch w.r.t. the training set, and even across different sensors. The proposed method, published online as an off-the-shelf software tool, allows users to perform fast and high-quality CNN-based pansharpening of their own target images on general-purpose hardware