Fusion of Heterogeneous Multisensor Data

One of the main future tasks in the field of reconnaissance and surveillance is the data fusion of heterogeneous systems. For this purpose, sensor data of airborne and spaceborne systems, which acquire the data from the same scene with different spatial and spectral coverage, are used. The employment of different sensors offers the opportunity to take benefit of the specific sensor characteristic to detect and fuse complementary features of the same object. Examples are operational status by IR sensors or material properties provided by multispectral sensor data. The use of different sensors enables the exploitation and the extraction of information on different levels. A data fusion as well as a feature fusion may support a value adding to the reconnaissance chain, which is especially helpful for the interpretation of built up areas in urban terrain. A prerequisite of every data fusion is the registration. In the case of heterogeneous datasets of sensors with different imaging properties a rigorous orthorectification is necessary. In this paper different examples are presented for a fusion of orthorectified multisensor data. Data fusion on pixel level and feature vector fusion are demonstrated using image data of IR, SAR, VIS and cadastral information.