Engineering Remote Sensing

The importance of remote sensing methods and techniques for different engineering branches has been well known for several decades, even before the deployment of the first satellite sensor for Earth observation. Indeed, it has been recognized since the first applications of aerial and close-range photogrammetry to mapping, digital terrain and man-made object modeling, ground and infrastructure geomatic monitoring, cultural heritage documentation and industrial metrology.

These still constitute most of the fields of remote sensing applications in engineering, which nowadays are more and more supported by geospatial information models, methods and techniques. Geospatial information has in fact emerged as a fundamental asset to process, integrate, publish and share remote sensing and other data coming from various sources, like environmental, social and economic databases and archives.

The emerging approach could be summarized with the acronym GEO, which stands for Geospatial information and Earth Observation. Geospatial information includes the basic aspects of GIS and advanced geospatial platforms (Digital Twin Earth(s)) that allow us to navigate, query and analyze online the state of our planet in space and time. Earth observation is conceptually the integration of the network of sensors, on any platform, that allow us to sense the Earth and the arsenal of methods useful to retrieve information from the sensed data.

The continuous science and technology improvement (with respect to sensors, model- and data-driven algorithms, geospatial infrastructures and computational facilities) has made more and newer observations and results available, in an increasingly distributed and shared way, and at a higher and higher rate. Thanks to this, new important application fields have been opened where GEO plays a pivotal role; examples are given by UN Sustainable Development Goals achievement monitoring, geospatial analysis of the water–food–energy ecosystem nexus, multiresolution spacetime landscape monitoring, natural and anthropogenic hazard and disaster monitoring and human and good mobility. In addition, requests for new demanding applications have asked for new data quality assessment, integration and analysis methods.

The main aim of this section is therefore the presentation and discussion of new advancement in GEO: sensors and data acquisition modeling, innovative signal, image and geospatial processing (including artificial intelligence approaches) and management methods and tools, in relation to the abovementioned application fields, related to civil, constructional, environmental, industrial safety and civil protection engineering. Research as well as review articles on these topics are welcome within the Special Issues of this section.