Digital Image Processing in Remote Sensing

Imaging systems, particularly those on board satellites, provide a repetitive and consistent view of the earth that has been used in many remote sensing applications such as urban growth, deforestation and crop monitoring, weather prediction, land use mapping, land cover mapping and so on. For each application it is necessary to develop a specific methodology to extract information from the image data. To develop a methodology it is necessary to identify a procedure based on image processing techniques that is more adequate to the problem solution. In spite of the application complexity, some basic techniques are common in most of the remote sensing applications named as image registration, image fusion, image segmentation and classification. Hence, this paper aims to present an overview about the use of image processing techniques to solve a general problem on remote sensing application. A case study on an urban application is provided to illustrate the use of remote sensing technologies for solving the problem.