It is both an honour and a pleasure to have been invited to write this Foreword for the inaugural issue of the new International Journal of Image and Data Fusion. The Editor-in-Chief, Professor Zhang Jixian and his editorial team have done an excellent job to put together such a good issue to launch this journal. The papers are by both world renowned scholars in the field of image and data fusion as well as by up and coming young researchers in this field.
The issue contains a good mix of review papers and original research papers on both methodology and applications. The international status of the journal is shown by the inclusion of papers from North America, various European countries, Africa and Asia. Papers in the pipeline for subsequent issues further illustrate this, as they come from researchers in many countries. This shows that image and data fusion is a very active field of research, with many new technical and methodological developments, in an increasing number of real world applications. In particular, the need for rapid change detection, image and data fusion techniques can play an important role to monitor such changes to our environment.
Over the past 20 years since image fusion became an important method for analysing earth observation data, there have been many advances in satellite and airborne data types, with ever increasing spatial, spectral and temporal resolutions. This not only requires continuously new algorithms and methods for fusing not only imagery, but also images with other data types, such as maps, statistical data, etc., to study complex relationships on earth surface processes. This has become possible by rapidly increasing computer power, data storage and speed of data transfer, enabling the efficient merging of large data sets.
For young researchers in the field of image and data fusion, this new journal will form a major source of information. The many literature references cited at the end of the review papers and the research articles will point them in the right direction, to guide them in making new algorithms, improving existing ones and in developing more novel applications for this exciting field of scientific research.
The editorial team has assembled a very high-level international editorial board to ensure the quality of this new journal. Together with the world-wide marketing and distribution network of Taylor & Francis, this augers well for the future of this initiative. As such, I hope that the International Journal of Image and Data Fusion will realise its objective of becoming the single source of information for all aspects of image and data fusion methodologies, developments, techniques and applications. I wish everyone success in this effort, and hope you will enjoy reading this first issue. I encourage you to submit your research results to the International Journal of Image and Data Fusion.