ABSTRACT
This important chapter contains practical experiences of remote sensing image fusion. It aims at providing an overview on existing practices. This overview on implemented applications for remote sensing image fusion was compiled from published results from international peer-reviewed journals and complemented by expert experiences. For the past 23 years, the authors themselves carried out quite a number of studies in RSIF, among which are applications such as topographic map updating (Pohl 1996; Pohl and Genderen 1999; Pohl and Hashim 2014), mineral exploitation (Pour et al. 2013), underground coal fires (Zhang et al. 1998), urban mapping (Amarsaikhan et al. 2010), landmine/minefield detection (Maathuis and Genderen 2004a,b), land use/land cover mapping (Zeng et al. 2010), and earthquake prediction (Genderen 2004, 2005). The identification of achievements in RSIF for different applications is rather difficult because more research has gone into the development of better algorithms rather than advancing the application. The transfer from science to application and operational implementation still lacks attention even though quite some advancement has been achieved in the past decade. This chapter intends to draw attention to this fact and provides a good overview on the current state of the art in RSIF applications. Most applications can be observed at local, regional, and global scales. The choice of area coverage strongly influences all other parameters such as sensor selection, data preprocessing, and fusion technique followed by postprocessing and data exploitation.
