Multisource Data Fusion and Reasoning in Remote Sensing: From Perception to Decision Making
A special issue of Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292). This special issue belongs to the section "AI Remote Sensing".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 16 March 2026 | Viewed by 22
Special Issue Editors
Interests: multi-source image interpretation; cross-domain scene classification
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: multimodal remote sensing interpretation
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
With the rapid advancement of remote sensing technology, multi-source data acquisition has become increasingly prevalent, including imagery from diverse sensors such as optical, SAR, infrared, hyperspectral, and LiDAR. These multi-modal data provide complementary insights yet exhibit significant variations in geometric, radiometric, and physical properties. Effectively integrating such diverse information is essential to achieving a comprehensive, accurate, and robust interpretation of complex scenes and dynamic processes.
Multi-source data fusion and reasoning hold great potential to bridge low-level perceptual tasks with high-level semantic understanding and structured decision support. Such capabilities are critical for a wide range of applications, including urban planning and smart city management, disaster emergency response and recovery, environmental and climate change monitoring, agricultural resource allocation, and ecosystem conservation. However, substantial challenges remain in achieving seamless cross-modal integration, such as reconciling cross-modal semantic gaps, modeling spatial and structural relationships, and establishing reliable reasoning mechanisms under high heterogeneity.
This Special Issue aims to present original research and review articles that address these challenges and present novel methodologies, scalable frameworks, and practical applications in multi-source remote sensing data fusion and reasoning. We welcome contributions that explore advanced topics including, but not limited to, the following:
- Cross-platform (satellite, drone, ground) semantic alignment and knowledge transfer;
- Joint modeling and reasoning of heterogeneous modes such as optics, SAR, and infrared;
- Reasoning mechanisms for multi-temporal, multi-scale, and multi-angle remote sensing scenes;
- Scene semantic relationship reasoning and complex event understanding;
- Causal inference and context awareness for remote sensing tasks;
- Migration and adaptation of LLM/MLLM in remote sensing;
- Large-scale cross-modal datasets and annotation systems for remote sensing reasoning;
- Integrated perception and intelligent reasoning of air, space, and ground.
Dr. Xiangtao Zheng
Prof. Dr. Yaxiong Chen
Dr. Hailong Ning
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 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
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-blind 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
- remote sensing multi-modal learning
- vision–language models
- multi-modal reasoning
- cross-modal alignment
- multi-source fusion
- reinforcement learning
- remote sensing agent systems
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