Foreword to the Special Issue on Data Fusion
DATA fusion emerged as a new topic in the late 1980s, but it was only by the first half of the following decade that the availability of remotely sensed data in digital form by different sources allowed the consideration of remote-sensing data fusion. At that point, the Data Fusion Technical Committee (DFTC) of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society recognized the need for a Special Issue on the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING about "data fusion," which was published in May 1999. That pioneering issue brought to the attention of many researchers the need for an increased effort toward the joint exploitation of multiple data or information sources.