Preface

This book presents the most recent environmental studies on remote sensing applications. Different sensors that start in both active and passive sensors are used in remote sensing applications. While passive remote sensing simply measures the electromagnetic radiation reflected from the target, active remote sensing transmits and measures electromagnetic radiation that is both emitted and reflected. Wide sensor coverage starts with satellite platforms and extends to unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs). What distinguishes a drone from a UAV? An unmanned aircraft or vessel that is piloted remotely or automatically is referred to as a drone. A UAV is a flying object without a pilot.

Remote sensing is a tool used for gathering target information without any physical/direct contact with the Earth's surface. It is a widely used science for the identification and mapping of the various objects/materials present on the Earth's crust. The electromagnetic wavelength ranges from 0.38 µm to 100 cm, which is visible to the microwave region and is utilized for capturing the information from the Earth's surface along with different sensors to capture the electromagnetic spectrum's energy. This technique is useful for monitoring, protecting, and managing diverse natural resources and land cover.

This book covers a variety of applications, including crop monitoring, ice automatic mapping, carbon offset forests, and image processing.

Chapter 1 is an introductory chapter that presents the novel Marghany-Based Genetic Algorithm (MBGA) for automatically detecting ice covers in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. The MBGA is designed as discrete steps in a modified genetic algorithm (GA).

Chapter 2 highlights recent advances in SAR systems and their applications in crop growth monitoring. It provides an overview of recent advancements in SAR systems, a summary of SAR information sources, the applications in crop monitoring including crop classification, crop parameter estimation, and change detection, and perspectives for future application development.

Chapter 3 demonstrates a series of optical satellite data, specifically LANDSAT 8, in tracking the carbon offset identification in Malaysian forests. It demonstrates an excellent method for tracking and monitoring deforestation in Malaysia.

Chapter 4 provides an overview of the principles and applications of optical remote sensing in planetary science. It briefly introduces the planetary space environment before discussing the principles of optical remote sensing and planetary optical radiations. The chapter ends with a discussion of current and future optical remote sensing plans in China.

Chapter 5 scrutinizes a significant image enhancement tutorial. It considers both histogram modification and transform domain methods as well as hybrid methods. Furthermore, it proposes a new hybrid algorithm for remote sensing image enhancement. Quality metrics such as Contrast Gain, Enhancement Measurement, Discrete Entropy, and Average Mean Brightness Error are also shown for objective comparison.

Chapter 6 serves as an excellent tool for identifying geological features. It shows how to distinguish between various minerals and lithologies using ASTER satellite data's short-wave infrared (SWIR) and thermal infrared (TIR) spectral bands. It also goes into detail about the value of integrated datasets from SWIR- and TIR-derived results and how to use them to demarcate different litho-units.

Chapter 7 presents transproc, a reconfigurable generic processor that can execute operations related to linear transformations like Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and Forward Discrete Cosine Transform. (FDCT), or Forward Discrete Wavelet Transform (FDWT). A graph-theoretic lemma is used to find the applicability of such a processor to calculate the flow graph-related parallel operations found in these linear transformations. The architecture level design and processing element level design are also demonstrated in this chapter.

Chapter 8 introduces a technique based on a UAV. In this chapter, the multispectral images acquired by the UAV are exploited to establish a method to identify which banana regions were infected or uninfected with Fusarium wilt disease. The results suggest that UAV-based multispectral imagery with a red-edge band is effective to identify banana Fusarium wilt disease and that the CIRE had the best performance.

Finally, Chapter 9 considers various aspects of the optical and radiolocation sensing and imaging of the Earth's surface from space. These sensors (the payload), being placed on the satellite bus (platform), cannot be used for the satellite mission without its other subsystems. The mission itself, as well as the payload's successful operation and image-providing capability, essentially depends on Satellite Control System SCS and its performance.

I wish to convey my appreciation to the staff at IntechOpen, especially Editorial Project Manager Ms. Karmen Đaleta. Without their commitment and support, this book would not have been possible.

> **Dr. Maged Marghany** Professor, Director, Global Geoinformation, Sdn. Bhd., Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

## **Chapter 1**
