Conclusions and Directions for Future Research

This monograph is a dedicated text dealing with the problem of fusion of hyperspectral data for visualization purposes. A hyperspectral image consists of a few hundred spectral bands which together encompass the reflectance response of the scene over a large bandwidth. One can think of hyperspectral image as a collection of a large number of bands that are narrow-band and contiguous in design. The visualization of this huge multidimensional data over a standard display device is an important but quite a challenging task. In this monograph, we explain various solutions to this problem in the form of visualization-oriented image fusion. Through each of the four solutions, we explore different aspects of the fusion process while the primary objective of visualization remains the same. None of the presented solutions assume any priori knowledge of the scene or the imaging system. The fused image gets generated solely from the input hyperspectral data without requiring any external information. We provide some concluding remarks on the fusion techniques discussed in the monograph. We also discuss future directions for research in this area.