Innovative Remote Sensing Methods and Applications for Smart Cities

Dear Colleagues,

The rapid urbanization of the 21st century presents both unprecedented opportunities and challenges for city planners, environmental managers, and policymakers. Remote sensing, as a non-invasive, scalable, and cost-efficient technology, has rapidly evolved into a key enabler of smart city development. Traditional applications in land use mapping and environmental monitoring have now expanded to real-time traffic analysis, energy consumption modeling, infrastructure integrity assessments, and disaster risk mitigation. The recent convergence of AI, deep learning, and cloud computing with geospatial technology has significantly enhanced the analytical capacity and automation of remote sensing workflows, allowing cities to move toward more intelligent and anticipatory management systems. Innovative platforms such as high-resolution Earth observation satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), ground-based sensor networks, and even crowd-sourced mobile data are generating massive, heterogeneous datasets. Integrating these sources through remote sensing technologies and advanced analytics enables a granular, dynamic, and multidimensional understanding of urban environments. Despite its transformative potential, several challenges remain in applying remote sensing to smart cities, including issues related to data integration, algorithm generalization, spatial–temporal resolution trade-offs, and policy translation. Addressing these research gaps through multidisciplinary approaches is essential for fully realizing the role of remote sensing in intelligent urban systems.

This Special Issue aims to explore cutting-edge methodologies, technologies, and applications of remote sensing that contribute to the design, development, and management of smart cities. The goal is to provide a forum for researchers, technologists, urban planners, and policy experts to present and discuss recent advances that bridge the gap between geospatial science and urban intelligence as follows:

• Novel remote sensing methods such as deep learning models for semantic segmentation of urban features, real-time sensor networks, and satellite-based urban analytics.
• Practical applications demonstrating how remote sensing supports urban services, e.g., transportation systems, climate adaptation, housing, public safety, and emergency response.
• Interdisciplinary studies integrating remote sensing with urban planning, environmental science, computer vision, and policy analysis.
• Emerging trends such as digital twins, edge computing, and the use of generative AI for urban modeling.

Suggested topics of interest are as follows:

• AI and machine learning applications in urban remote sensing.
• Multisensor fusion for urban land-use classification.
• Three-dimensional city modeling using LiDAR and photogrammetry.
• Remote sensing for urban environmental monitoring (e.g., air pollution and UHI).
• Change detection and spatiotemporal analytics for urban dynamics.
• Remote sensing-driven urban infrastructure assessment.
• Satellite and UAV-based smart mobility and traffic analytics.

The types of submissions we are accepting are as follows:

• Original research articles.
• Comprehensive review papers.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Tingting Xu
Dr. Biao He
Dr. Jay Gao
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• urban remote sensing
• smart city applications
• artificial intelligence in remote sensing
• multisensor data fusion
• urban monitoring and management