Abstract
In spatial information processing, particularly in non-renewable resource exploration, the spatial data sets, including remote sensing, geophysical and geochemical data, have to be geocoded onto a reference map and integrated for the final analysis and interpretation. Application of a computer based GIS(Geographical Information System of Geological Information System) at some point of the spatial data integration/fusion processing is now a logical and essential step. It should, however, be pointed out that the basic concepts of the GIS based spatial data fusion were developed with insufficient mathematical understanding of spatial characteristics or quantitative modeling framwork of the data. Furthermore many remote sensing and geological data sets, available for many exploration projects, are spatially incomplete in coverage and interduce spatially uneven information distribution. In addition, spectral information of many spatial data sets is often imprecise due to digital rescaling. Direct applications of GIS systems to spatial data fusion can therefore result in seriously erroneous final results. To resolve this problem, some of the important mathematical information representation techniques are briefly reviewed and discussed in this paper with condideration of spatial and spectral characteristics of the common remote sensing and exploration data. They include the basic probabilistic approach, the evidential belief function approach (Dempster-Shafer method) and the fuzzy logic approach. Even though the basic concepts of these three approaches are different, proper application of the techniques and careful interpretation of the final results are expected to yield acceptable conclusions in cach case. Actual tests with real data (Moon, 1990a; An etal., 1991, 1992, 1993) have shown that implementation and application of the methods discussed in this paper consistently provide more accurate final results than most direct applications of GIS techniques.