Professor Lorenzo Bruzzone has been extremely kind with me by proposing to me the co-chair
position for an invited session at IGARSS 2010. The session is entitled "Change Detection ad Multitemporal Image Analysis".
Land use and cover change is a major topic in remote sensing image processing and, as you may be aware of, there are many coming space borne systems which will be dedicated to this kind of application: Venus, the Sentinel Programme, etc.
In this context, there is an increasing need for processing techniques which allow to exploit the richness of this kind of data. The classical approach for the use of multi-temporal remote sensing
image data has been the use data assimilation frameworks. That is, models of evolution in which data is used mainly as a means for checking the soundness of models' predictions. This approach gives more weight to the model, since the data is scarce.
As pointed out above, in the coming years the amount of available data will be important, and one might want to try other approaches where data takes over models. Of course, it would be wrong to blindly apply data analysis tools without using existing models, but the assimilation techniques may benefit from changes induced by the availability of more data.
