Overview of the System

Abstract

Before the development of remote sensing technology, only black and white (color) aerial photographs were available for surveying situations on the ground, and the analysis of the photographs was made by human specialists via visual inspection. This process, however, not only requires very specialized skills but also tends to be subjective. That is, the result of the analysis relies heavily on subjective judgements by an analyst and hence lacks objectivity. The development of various sensors for remote sensing has enabled us to measure multispectral properties of objects over a wide range of the spectrum, and techniques for pattern recognition and digital picture processing have facilitated the quantitative measurements of the situations.