Contest – Extremely High Resolution LiDAR and Optical Data: A Data Fusion Challenge

has organized a yearly Data Fusion Contest aiming at stimulating new ideas at the research and operational levels to address multisource remote sensing problems [1-8]. I. THE 2015 DATA FUSION CONTEST The 2015 IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contest provided a challenging image analysis opportunity, including multiresolution and multisensor fusion at extremely high spatial resolution. Two datasets, acquired simultaneously by passive and active sensors, were involved. The passive data source was a 5-cm resolution color RGB orthophoto. The active source was a LiDAR dataset, for which both the raw 3D point cloud (with density of 65 pts/m, including the LiDAR return intensities) and a digital surface model (with 10-cm point spacing) were distributed to the community. Both datasets were acquired on March 13, 2011, using an airborne platform flying at an altitude of 300 m over the harbor area of Zeebruges, Belgium (Fig