IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - March 2018 - 3

from the editor
By James L. Garrison

Welcome from the
New Editor-in-Chief

elcome to the sixth year of IEEE Geoscience and
Remote Sensing Magazine and my first issue as
editor-in-chief. I'm honored to follow in the footsteps of
Lorenzo Bruzzone, who was instrumental in getting the
magazine off the ground and growing it to its current
status. During my tenure, I hope to continue this trajectory by publishing high-quality, peer-reviewed articles
of general interest to the remote-sensing community.
This March issue starts off with a review by Fabio
Dell'Acqua and Giuseppe Siciliano of the global state
of graduate education in aerospace and remote sensing.
Statistics on research productivity are used to identify
some of the most active universities in the remote-sensing field. The article concludes with more in-depth reviews
of several specialized master's degree programs around
the world.
Our second feature article, by Wei Li, Fubiao Feng,
Hengchao Li, and Qian Du, is a review of discriminant
analysis-based dimension reduction approaches for hyperspectral image classification. The large amount of information provided by hyperspectral data allows for the
accurate classification of scenes, but this accuracy comes
at a high computational cost and deteriorated performance when the training data are limited. Dimension
reduction is, thus, an important aspect of multispectral
image processing. After a review of the essential theory,
the authors compare a total of eight methods using three
different example data sets.
While discussing the challenges of extracting useful
knowledge from the increasing volume of data, I must
remind our readers of the 2018 IEEE Geoscience and
Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) Data Fusion Contest,
organized by the IEEE Image Analysis and Data Fusion
Technical Committee. This contest is described in this
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MGRS.2018.2798121
Date of publication: 30 March 2018

march 2018

ieee Geoscience and remote sensing magazine

issue's "Technical Committees" column. Participants
obtained a data set consisting of multispectral light detecting and ranging, hyperspectral, and very-high-resolution red-green-blue imagery, along with training data.
The winners will be invited to present their results at the
2018 IEEE GRSS Symposium in Valencia, Spain, and coauthor a paper in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied
Earth Observations and Remote Sensing.
The "Space Agencies" column describes the COSMOSkyMed Second Generation ground segment capabilities for interoperability, expandability, and multisensor/
multimission support. Multiple scenarios for collaborations with partner organizations in the use of COSMOSkyMed data are outlined.
Version 1.3 of the GLOBE Data Entry App is introduced
in the "Education" column. GLOBE is an international program providing primary and secondary school students
with hands-on education in making observations of the
Earth system. Finally, two GRSS Chapters are featured in
this issue: the GRSS Argentina Section Chapter and the
GRSS Washington/Northern Virginia Chapter.
Looking ahead, I am very excited about my new role
as editor-in-chief. In reviewing manuscripts for forthcoming issues, I have gained a new appreciation of the
breadth and depth of the research and applications work
of the remote-sensing community. I would like to encourage continued input from our GRSS members. Articles can be submitted through ScholarOne Manuscripts
at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/grsm. Tutorial
and feature articles, intended to inform and educate
readers among the broad remote-sensing community,
are welcome, as well as contributions to our regular columns: "Chapters," "Space Agencies," "Women in GRS,"
"Education," "Software and Data Sets," and "Conference
Reports." Proposals for special issues are encouraged and
should be sent to me at jlg@ieee.org.
grs

http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/grsm

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - March 2018