While deep learning techniques have an increasing impact on many technical
fields, gathering sufficient amounts of training data is a challenging problem
in remote sensing. In particular, this holds for applications involving data
from multiple sensors with heterogeneous characteristics. One example for that
is the fusion of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data and optical imagery. With
this paper, we publish the SEN1-2 dataset to foster deep learning research in
SAR-optical data fusion. SEN1-2 comprises 282,384 pairs of corresponding image
patches, collected from across the globe and throughout all meteorological
seasons. Besides a detailed description of the dataset, we show exemplary
results for several possible applications, such as SAR image colorization,
SAR-optical image matching, and creation of artificial optical images from SAR
input data. Since SEN1-2 is the first large open dataset of this kind, we
believe it will support further developments in the field of deep learning for
remote sensing as well as multi-sensor data fusion.Comment: accepted for publication in the ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry,
Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences (online from October 2018