ABSTRACT
Remote sensing has arguably emerged as the most important discipline in Telegeoinformatics employed in the collection of spatially related information for use in geospatial databases. This chapter introduces the fundamental principles of remote sensing from a Telegeoinformatics perspective. It reviews the nature of electromagnetic radiation and how the reflected or emitted energy in the visible, near-infrared, middleinfrared, thermal infrared, and microwave portions of the electromagnetic spectrum can be collected by a variety of sensor systems. Emphasis in this chapter is placed on the extraction of thematic information using digital image interpretation techniques and the extraction of metric information using digital photogrammetric techniques from remotely sensed data. This chapter shows non-experts what remote sensing is and what imaging software does and provides them with sufficient expertise to use it. It also gives specialists an overview of these totally digital processes from A to Z. Along with other Telegeoinformatics technologies, remote sensing represents the primary means of generating data for geospatial databases.
