Deep learning-driven multisource remote sensing image fusion: Advances, challenges, and future directions

Abstract

Multisource remote sensing image fusion has become an important solution to a long-standing limitation in Earth observation: individual sensors rarely provide high spatial detail, rich spectral information, reliable structural sensitivity, and frequent temporal coverage at the same time. This review examines how deep learning and artificial intelligence are being used to integrate multispectral, hyperspectral, panchromatic, optical, and synthetic aperture radar imagery for more reliable interpretation of complex ground scenes. It provides a technical synthesis of convolutional neural networks, autoencoders, generative adversarial networks, transformer architectures, diffusion models, and hybrid model driven approaches, with attention to their fusion mechanisms, reconstruction behavior, computational demand, and suitability for operational use. Applications include land cover mapping, precision agriculture, environmental monitoring, urban analysis, disaster assessment, and defense related interpretation. Rather than treating each fusion task separately, this review connects sensor heterogeneity, spatial and spectral resolution trade offs, radiometric correction, geometric correction, registration, noise reduction, and fusion level design within a single framework. The analysis indicates that convolutional models remain effective for stable local detail recovery, adversarial learning can improve visual sharpness but may introduce spectral distortion, transformer models better capture long range spatial and spectral relationships, and diffusion models offer refined reconstruction at greater computational cost. The review further identifies open challenges involving misregistration, spectral bias, limited labeled data, weak generalization across sensors, high memory requirements, and limited interpretability. Future progress should prioritize sensor aware learning, self supervised training, uncertainty aware evaluation, lightweight deployment, and application oriented benchmarks to improve reliability in operational Earth observation.