Foreword to the Special Issue on Hyperspectral Image and Signal Processing

A LMOST A DECADE after the milestone special issue of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING (TGRS) dedicated to the analysis of hyperspectral image data, edited by Prof. Landgrebe, Prof. Serpico, Prof. Crawford, and Prof. Singhroy [1], it is a great pleasure to introduce this new special issue on hyperspectral image and signal processing. In the intervening years, interest in hyperspectral sensing has increased dramatically, as evidenced by advances in sensing technology and planning for future hyperspectral missions, increased availability of hyperspectral data from airborne and space-based platforms, and development of methods for analyzing data and new applications. The proposal for this special issue was also related to the launch of a series of specialized workshops on hyperspectral sensing that had technical sponsorship of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society. The first Workshop on Hyperspectral Image and Signal Processing—Evolution in Remote Sensing (WHISPERS) was held in Grenoble, France, in 2009, with 200 attendees from 33 countries. The second was hosted in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 2010 and featured a commercial exhibition of sensors and data products, as well as an outstanding technical program. The third WHISPERS workshop is scheduled for June 2011 in Lisbon, Portugal, and will be followed by venues in Asia in 2012 and America in 2013. Following the inaugural 2009 workshop and the open call for papers, an impressive number of submissions (66) were received for this special issue, which contains 24 papers. A few of the submissions will be published in the following regular issues of TGRS, after the final reviews and revisions are completed. The strong interest in hyperspectral remote sensing, also referred to as imaging spectroscopy, has resulted in significant research and contributions to the literature in the geoscience and remote sensing community. In the remainder of this foreword, we review key issues and topics of current interest related to hyperspectral data processing. While the topics are very similar to those covered by the previous special issue a decade ago, the techniques have evolved, both improving existing methods and advancing in new directions to improve the performance of sensing systems and algorithms, as well as tackling increasingly more challenging applications. Simulation. Simulating realistic hyperspectral data is a very challenging task that is critical to both the design of new sensors and planning of new missions [2]–[4] and in a quantitative assessment of the performance of sensors and processing algorithms [5]. In this special issue, three papers deal with this problem, in different contexts: planetary exploration and