Foreword to the Special Issue on Pattern Recognition in Remote Sensing

S PACEBORNE and airborne remote sensors have important applications in environmental monitoring, resource management, disaster response, and homeland security. Remote sensors with different modalities (e.g., multispectral, hyperspectral, optical, infrared, and radar sensors) are now often used together to achieve the optimal outcomes in information mining and scene understanding. Pattern recognition is very useful in the analysis of remote sensing data. The large amount of data available makes remote sensing technology uniquely suitable for statistical pattern recognition [1]. To address the challenges and advances in pattern recognition in remote sensing, the Remote Sensing and Mapping Technical Committee (TC7) of International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) organized a biennial workshop on Pattern Recognition in Remote Sensing (PRRS). This workshop series has been a popular forum for peers to exchange ideas and timely follow the trends in both fields of pattern recognition and remote sensing. On November 11, 2012, PRRS was successfully held in Tsukuba Science City, Japan. Following the tradition of previous journal special issues [2]–[5], we are glad to present a new special issue associated with PRRS in 2012. Twenty-five papers are included, which are briefly introduced as below.