Development of New Pattern Recognition Techniques to Cope with Latin America Environmental Issues

Dear Colleagues,

Latin America has environmental issues that call on remote sensing technology and specific analysis tools to cope with them. Deforestation detection and real time surveillance, agriculture and sustainability, cropland mapping and statistics, disaster management, urban planning, land cover change mapping, and others, are problems that need new Pattern Recognition (PR) algorithms and methods that are tuned and tested for local characteristics. Most deforestation detection is still done visually. The intense cloud cover in the area suggests SAR data usage to be a substitute for the use of optical data when necessary carries the need to develop PR algorithms to be used solo or fused with optical data. This Special Issue focuses on suitable pattern recognition methods to analyze environmental problems that affect the Latin American continent, with a global significance.

Submissions may relate to the following scientific questions (but not limited to them):

1. New automatic methods for timely deforestation detection, using optical, SAR data and/or high time resolution optical data.
2. Image analysis for early forest fire detection.
3. Usage of CBERS optical imagery and data from other Latin America missions.
4. How to design a system to resolve hard-to-separate land cover classes, like agro-forest systems in the Amazon.
5. Region based classification as an alternative for improved cropland mapping or land cover change mapping.
6. How to take in account local classes and semantics to improve land cover mapping.
7. Taking in account source data characteristics, like SAR data, for multi-temporal classification and mapping processes.
8. Change detection with Polarimetric SAR imagery.
9. Urban planning and mapping.

Dr. Luciano Vieira Dutra
Dr. Raul Queiroz Feitosa
Dr. Maria Juliana Gambini
Dr. Rogério Galante Negri
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.

• Automatic deforestation detection
• Classifier selection and optimization
• Land use / land cover classification
• Image semantics
• Land change mapping
• Agro-forest classification
• Fire detection