Multimodal Remote Sensing Data Fusion via Coherent Point Set Analysis

We present a novel fusion algorithm for electronic-reconnaissance (ER) satellite and optical imaging satellite data using coherent point set (CPS) analysis. This work is motivated by a large-scale maritime surveillance problem, where ship groups in the observations are of particular interest for tactical and strategic operations. Fusion of observations from ER satellite and optical imaging satellite is a challenging task. On the one hand, dense and continuous measurement is not available for optical imagery. On the other hand, it is difficult to extract robust features from ER measurements. Considering that the size of a ship is often less than the distance among different ships, we treat each ship as a mass point. The contributions of our work are threefold. First, multisensor data fusion is accomplished by CPS association. To the best of our knowledge, this letter is the first to investigate CPS for multimodal remote sensing data fusion. Second, a novel geometry descriptor, which encodes the topological characteristics of a point set, is presented. Third, we combine both topological features and attributive features within the framework of Dempster–Shafer theory for CPS analysis. The proposed method has been tested using different sets of simulated data and recorded data. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.