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Cross-Modal Learning and Pattern Recognition in Multisource Remote Sensing

A Special Issue of Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292) belonging to the section "Remote Sensing Image Processing".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 March 2027 | Viewed by 781

Editors


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Guest Editor
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China
Interests: RGB-D image; segmentation; LiDAR; ground intelligent robot

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Guest Editor
Technologies of Vision, Digital Industry Center, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy
Interests: pattern recognition; computer vision; remote sensing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Multisource remote sensing has revolutionized our ability to observe and understand Earth’s surface and atmosphere by providing complementary data from a variety of sensors and platforms. The integration of optical, radar, LiDAR, thermal, SAR, and hyperspectral data offers unprecedented opportunities to characterize environmental and anthropogenic processes with enhanced accuracy, robustness, and spatial–temporal coverage. However, effectively fusing these heterogeneous data sources remains a significant challenge, necessitating advanced computational approaches that can learn cross-modal representations and recognize complex patterns across different spectral, spatial, and structural domains.

In recent years, cross-modal learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm in remote sensing, enabling models to leverage complementary information from disparate data types, translate between modalities, and improve generalization in tasks such as classification, detection, segmentation, and change monitoring. Coupled with advances in pattern recognition—driven by deep learning, graph neural networks, attention mechanisms, and explainable AI—these methods are unlocking new possibilities in land cover mapping, disaster response, urban planning, agriculture, forestry, oceanography, and climate studies.

This Special Issue invites original research and review articles that explore innovative methodologies, applications, and case studies in cross-modal learning and pattern recognition using multisource remote sensing data. We welcome contributions that address both theoretical advances and practical implementations, with an emphasis on scalable, interpretable, and transferable solutions. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Cross-modal data fusion and alignment;
  • Multimodal representation learning and feature extraction;
  • Self-supervised and few-shot learning across modalities;
  • Domain adaptation and generalization in multisource settings;
  • Pattern recognition for land use/land cover classification;
  • Object detection and segmentation from multimodal imagery;
  • Change detection and time-series analysis with heterogeneous data;
  • Explainable AI and interpretability in cross-modal models;
  • Benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics for multimodal remote sensing;
  • Applications in environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, urban studies, disaster management, unmanned systems, and climate research.

Dr. Xia Yuan
Dr. Mohamed Lamine Mekhalfi
Prof. Dr. Yakoub Bazi
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • cross-modal learning
  • multisource remote sensing
  • data fusion
  • pattern recognition
  • deep learning
  • multimodal representation
  • feature extraction
  • domain adaptation
  • explainable AI
  • environmental monitoring

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

25 pages, 7145 KB  
Article
Reliability-Aware Cross-Modal Fusion of Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 Optical Imagery for Robust Patch-Level Land Cover Scene Classification
by Srinivas Vulli, Ming Liu and Zhenyu Huang
Remote Sens. 2026, 18(15), 2484; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs18152484 - 30 Jul 2026
Viewed by 457
Abstract
Fusing Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and Sentinel-2 optical imagery is challenging when one modality is degraded. This study proposes a reliability-aware cross-modal fusion framework for patch-level land cover scene classification, combining modality-specific encoders, per-modality classification heads, and a noise-aware reliability gate that [...] Read more.
Fusing Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and Sentinel-2 optical imagery is challenging when one modality is degraded. This study proposes a reliability-aware cross-modal fusion framework for patch-level land cover scene classification, combining modality-specific encoders, per-modality classification heads, and a noise-aware reliability gate that estimates adaptive fusion weights from feature representations, prediction confidence, and optical quality indicators. Sentinel-2 inputs were synthetically degraded under five controlled scenarios-Gaussian noise, heavy Gaussian noise, channel drop, cloud-like masking, and mixed degradation and six approaches were compared: SAR-only, optical-only, early fusion, feature-level fusion, logit-level fusion, and the proposed method. Experiments on a four-class SEN12MS-derived dataset (16,000 paired patches) were run under deterministic settings and reported over five random seeds. The proposed model achieved the highest or statistically comparable mean accuracy under clean, channel-drop, and cloud-mask conditions and a clear advantage under Gaussian noise (0.922 ± 0.051, versus 0.651 ± 0.201 for logit-level fusion and 0.293 ± 0.096 for optical-only) and remained the highest or statistically comparable method on clean inputs. Heavy noise remained the most challenging and seed-sensitive condition (0.604 ± 0.236 across seeds), although the representative run retained 86.3% accuracy, and a scene-held-out evaluation showed that the noise-robustness advantage persists under spatially independent testing. These results position reliability-aware fusion as a robustness-oriented strategy supported by multi-seed statistics and explicit failure-mode analysis. Full article
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