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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9034</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-archives-XLIX-B3-2026-105-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Evaluating Deep Matching Models for SAR-Optical Image Pairs using the SpaceNet9 Dataset</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Günzel</surname>
<given-names>Constantin</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Schmitt</surname>
<given-names>Michael</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of the Bundeswehr Munich</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>30</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XLIX-B3-2026</volume>
<fpage>105</fpage>
<lpage>111</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Constantin Günzel</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B3-2026/105/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B3-2026-105-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B3-2026/105/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B3-2026-105-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B3-2026/105/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B3-2026-105-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B3-2026/105/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B3-2026-105-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>This paper focuses on cross-modal image matching between Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and optical imagery, a longstanding challenge due to fundamental differences in imaging geometry and radiometry. Beyond applicational needs in satellite data fusion and downstream mapping, this study is motivated by the rapid advances in the field of Computer Vision. Thus, this work evaluates classical and modern learning-based feature matching methods on the renowned SpaceNet9 dataset using a unified evaluation framework. The results show that classical methods such as SIFT fail to produce reliable correspondences, while learning-based approaches, particularly MINIMA, significantly improve performance without additional retraining. However, matching accuracy is strongly influenced by scene structure and SAR-specific geometric effects, therefore robust SAR-optical correspondence remains an open challenge.</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="7"/></counts>
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