Data Fusion in Remote Sensing of Urban and Suburban Areas - Remote Sensing of Urban and Suburban Areas - page 185

Chapter 11
Data Fusion in Remote Sensing of Urban
and Suburban Areas

Thierry Ranchin and Lucien Wald

This chapter focuses on techniques related to image fusion and data fusion from
different sources with varying spatial and spectral resolutions, and presents and dis-
cusses some of the technical issues that influence data fusion in the urban context.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this chapter, you should be able to:

 Understand the process of data fusion in remote sensing of urban areas
 Explain the scope of and relations between multi-scale methods and
wavelet transforms for data fusion
 Understand and speak about applications of data fusion in urban areas

11.1 Introduction

Data fusion is becoming of paramount importance in the Earth observation science.
Data fusion is an approach oriented to information extraction adopted in several
domains. It is based on the synergetic exploitation of data originating from different
sources. It aims at producing a better result than that obtained by a separate exploita-
tion of the same sources. The utilization of satellite images and more generally of
observations of the Earth and our environment is presently one of the most productive
applications in data fusion (Wald 2002 ). Observation of the Earth is performed by
means of satellites, planes, ships, and ground-based instrument, and results in a great

T. Ranchin ( * ) and L. Wald
Center for Energy and Processes, MINES ParisTech, rue Claude Daunesse,
Sophia Antipolis Cedex 06904, France
e-mail: [e-mail]; [e-mail]