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BIG DATA and fusion

The topic of BIG DATA is still causing much confusion and misunderstanding in the Geospatial/Geomatic community. BIG DATA refers to a collection of extremely large and complex data sets that are difficult to process using available database management tools or traditional image/data processing software. To understand better what BIG DATA is, one should consider the well-established concepts from remote sensing image and data fusion, as then it becomes possible to harness the power of this new technology to benefit many applications and enable the study of Global Change, Natural Disasters and other phenomenon in a way not possible until recently. Remote sensing image and data fusion, with its techniques of data mining, change detection and image processing, can greatly help us to better understand and appreciate the power and benefits of BIG DATA. In terms of remote data sets, since the advent of earth observation satellites, the amount of data becoming available daily is in the order of exabytes. For LANDSAT and SPOT data, which have now been acquired for more than 40 and 25 years, respectively, the volumes of data are HUGE! Many applications are now possible than were inconceivable at the beginning of this new Millennium. Temporal changes, over a 40-year period, enable detailed studies of Global Change, deforestation, urban growth, land degradation and natural disasters such as floods and so on to be analysed in a timely manner. This can be done at global scales, and many animations exist showing changes in land cover and other environmental parameters of the entire world on a monthly, weekly and even daily basis. When looking at such animations, one does not realise the huge mosaicking, geometric and radiometric corrections that were necessary to make them possible. The same is true for the billions of users of Google Earth, where hundreds of thousands of high resolution images have been radiometrically and geometrically processed into one seamless fused image of the world. This has become possible because of the great progress in Image and data fusion, as can be seen by the many innovative research and review papers that have been published in the International Journal of Image and Data Fusion over the past five years. This, plus the rapid increase in computer power and storage facilities, have helped the field of remote sensing image and data fusion, as they allow an ever increasing volume (amount of remote sensing image data), velocity (speed of data in and out) and variety (range of remote sensing image and data types and sources) to be processed. Many new enabling technologies such as data compression, data mining, the cloud, artificial intelligence and neural networks, have enabled ever larger data sets to be prepared, fused and processed. The trend to larger data sets is therefore due to the additional information derivable from analysis of the large sets of available earth observation data, combined with the multitude of related data sets such as on environmental parameters, statistical data sets from ground-based sensors and sensor webs. Thus, using image and data fusion technologies, one can now find correlations, spot trends, determine quality of research and discover things not visible in any one data set by itself. International Journal of Image and Data Fusion, 2015 Vol. 6, No. 1, 1–2, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19479832.2014.997654