With the recent advances in remote sensing technologies for Earth observation, many different remote sensors are collecting data with distinctive properties. The obtained data are so large and complex that analyzing them manually becomes impractical or even impossible. Therefore, understanding remote sensing images effectively, in connection with physics, has been the primary concern of the remote sensing research community in recent years. For this purpose, machine learning is thought to be a promising technique because it can make the system learn to improve itself. With this distinctive characteristic, the algorithms will be more adaptive, automatic, and intelligent. This book introduces some of the most challenging issues of machine learning in the field of remote sensing, and the latest advanced technologies developed for different applications. It integrates with multi-source/multi-temporal/multi-scale data, and mainly focuses on learning to understand remote sensing images. Particularly, it presents many more effective techniques based on the popular concepts of deep learning and big data to reach new heights of data understanding. Through reporting recent advances in the machine learning approaches towards analyzing and understanding remote sensing images, this book can help readers become more familiar with knowledge frontier and foster an increased interest in this field.
