Fusion of SAR and optical remote sensing data — Challenges and recent trends

Abstract

In this paper, we summarize challenges, proposed solutions and recent trends in the field of SAR-optical remote sensing data fusion. Although being a pre-processing step before the actual fusion-by-estimation, it is shown that matching and coregistration is one of the core challenges in that regard, which is mainly due to the strongly different geometric and radiometric properties of the two observation types. We then review some of the published fusion methods and discuss the future trends of this topic.