Analysis of remotely sensed data: the formative decades and the future

Developments in the field of image understanding in remote sensing over the past four decades are reviewed, with an emphasis, initially, on the contributions of David Landgrebe and his colleagues at the Laboratory for Applications of Remote Sensing, Purdue University. The differences in approach required for multispectral, hyperspectral and radar image data are emphasised, culminating with a commentary on methods commonly adopted for multisource image analysis. The treatment concludes by examining the requirements of an operational multisource thematic mapping process, in which it is suggested that the most practical approach is to analyze each data type separately, by techniques optimized to that data's characteristics, and then to fuse at the label level.