Remote Sensing: The Image Chain Approach (Oxford Series on Optical and Imaging Sciences, 13)

Remote Sensing is a unique advanced text which covers the fundamental science underlying the rapidly growing field of remote sensing. Unlike similar books, which focus on one aspect of remote sensing, it treats the subject as a continuous process, including energy-matter interaction, radiation propagation, and data dissemination, and emphasizes the tools and procedures required to extract information from remotely sensed data using the image chain approach. Using the image chain analogy, the component processes are linked together using a common quantitative terminology that can be used to study physical parameters (e.g., reflectance and temperature) that are related to the type and condition of land cover features. This approach has evolved from over a decade of the author's teaching experience with undergraduate and graduate students and two decades of research and consulting experience on remote sensing problems for government and industry. Remote Sensing is ideal as a first text in remote sensing for graduate students and advanced undergraduates in the physical or engineering sciences, and will also serve as a valuable reference for the many practitioners of remote sensing throughout government and industry who were trained in the traditional technical disciplines and need to know how to better apply them to the remote sensing process.