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Abstract:
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Remotely-sensed images have been used for a long time in both
military and civilization applications. The images could be collected
from satellites, airborne platforms or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
(UAVs). Among the three, satellite images have gained popularity due
to large coverage, available data and so on. In general, remotelysensed images store information about Earth object’s reflectance of
lights, i.e. Sun’s light in passive remote sensing [1]. Therefore, the
images contain itself lots of valuable information of the Earth’s surface
or even under the surface.
Applications of remotely-sensed images are diverse. For example,
satellite images could be used in agriculture, forestry, geology,
hydrology, sea ice, land cover mapping, ocean and coastal [1]. In
agriculture, two important tasks are crop type mapping and crop
monitoring. Crop type mapping is the process of identification crops
and its distribution over an area. This is the first step to crop
monitoring which includes crop yield estimation, crop condition
assessment, and so on. To these aims, satellite images are efficient and
reliable means to derive the required information [1]. In forestry,
potential applications could be deforestation mapping, species
identification and forest fire mapping. In the forest where human
access is restricted, satellite imagery is an unique source of4
information for management and monitoring purposes. In geology,
satellite images could be used for structural mapping and terrain
analysis. In hydrology, some possible applications cloud be flood
delineation and mapping, river change detection, irrigation canal
leakage detection, wetlands mapping and monitoring, soil moisture
monitoring, and a lot of other researches. Iceberg detection and
tracking is also done via satellite data. Furthermore, air pollution and
meteorological monitoring could be possible from satellite
perspective. In general, many of the applications more or less relate to
land cover mapping, i.e. agriculture, flood mapping, forest mapping,
sea ice mapping, and so on. |