Book review for remote sensing image fusion: a practical guide

This is a very up to date book on remote sensing image fusion. The authors’ iconic paper on this subject, published back in 1998 (Pohl and van Genderen 1988), has already become a standard reference work for researchers (it has more than one thousand citations according to Google Scholar), and this new book treats the many new developments that have taken place since then. Some of these new developments were treated by the two authors in a paper in our journal in 2015 (Pohl and van Genderen 2015). It is one of the most comprehensive books ever published on the increasingly important topic of image fusion, especially nowadays in the era of Big Earth Data, with its very large data sets needing to be merged using imagery of different spatial, spectral and temporal characteristics.

The book is aimed at university educators, research scientists, students and others involved in this field. It is illustrated by many images, tables, and figures, plus a very extensive bibliography. A key feature of the book is the accompanying website: http://rsif.website which contains many useful extra resources such as Power Point presentations for each chapter, and other interesting information about remote sensing image fusion.

The book is well structured with clear headings, use of different fonts and references. One can see that the authors, besides being world renowned expert in their fields, are also very experienced and skilful educators.

Beginners using this book will greatly benefit from studying the first chapter, which gives a very good introduction to the topic, definitions, and treats the various issues and levels of image and data fusion.

The two key chapters I found of most interest were Chapter 2 (giving all the image fusion algorithms. More than 40 algorithms are provided and explained) and Chapter 6 which provides many excellent examples of the practical applications of image fusion.

The final chapter of the book discusses new research trends in image fusion. Readers of the International Journal of Digital Earth will find that this book gives them many research ideas on how to use image fusion techniques for BIG DATA, for the Internet of Things and other new technologies.

In summary, this major work has the following key features which make it very interesting for the target groups identified above:

*provides detailed mathematical background and algorithms of remote sensing image fusion techniques;

*covers many Earth observation applications in a multi-sensor context, relevant to many different disciples;

*gives an overview of the sensors, definitions and categorizes RSIF techniques.

This book is not only a good entry for newcomers or students, but also for experts wanting to understand the recent achievements. This book deserves a place in every university library as well as in the library of research institutes and on the bookshelf of those working actively in this field.

I can strongly recommend it to everyone wanting to know more about image fusion and to understand how it works. It is the type of book you will frequently want to pick up, look up some topic, or use in detail together with all the additional learning resources provided.