Remote Sensing Digital Image Analysis

Book excerpt: With the widespread availability of satellite and aircraft remote sensing image data in digital form, and the ready access most remote sensing practitioners have to computing systems for image interpretation, there is a need to draw together the range of digital image processing procedures and methodologies commonly used in this field into a single treatment. It is the intention of this book to provide such a function, at a level meaningful to the non-specialist digital image analyst, but in sufficient detail that algorithm limitations, alternative procedures and current trends can be appreciated. Often the applications specialist in remote sensing wishing to make use of digital processing procedures has had to depend upon either the mathematically detailed treatments of image processing found in the electrical engineering and computer science literature, or the sometimes necessarily superficial treatments given in general texts on remote sensing. This book seeks to redress that situation. Both image enhancement and classification techniques are covered making the material relevant in those applications in which photointerpretation is used for information extraction and in those wherein information is obtained by classification.