PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
December 2014
1103
BOOK
REVIEW
Advances in Mapping from Remote
Sensor Imagery: Techniques and
Applications
Xiaojun Yang and Jonathan Li.
CRC Press 2012. 427 pp. 18 color plates. Hardcover. $150.00
(list). ISBN: 978-1-4398-7458-5. eBook ISBN: 978-1-4398-7459-2
Reviewed by:
Doug Rickman, Applied Science
Team Lead, Earth Science Office, Marshall Space
Flight Center, National Aeronautics and Space
Administration
With several decades of experience across a broad spectrum of
remote sensing, I amexcited by the broad range of advancement
now underway in this field. Therefore, I was eager to read
Advances in Mapping from Remote Sensor Imagery,
edited by
Xiaojun Yang of Florida State University and Jonathan Li of
the University of Waterloo, Canada.
The physical characteristics of a book are important and
the first things that come to the reader’s attention. In this
hardbound book the paper is a pleasingly bright white and the
font is easily read, even for the old eyes of this reviewer. The
feel of the paper is coarser than I desire but is typical of many
new books. Color plates are collected together and are printed
on noticeably darker and yellowish paper, but the colors are
vibrant and easily discriminated. And only Figure 16.8 has
the too common defect of too much detail for too large an area.
This text is a compilation of 16 chapters. Each chapter is
written by different authors and starts with a numbered
outline with pagination and an introductory “abstract”. I like
the outline, and some of the authors took advantage of this
format to develop their texts in a nicely structured way. The
“abstracts” are less useful, especially as the editors did not
always prevent the abstract from being immediately repeated
in the body of the chapter, as is the case in chapter 1.
The preface asserts the book is to be considered in threemajor
parts. This reader could not detect any structure to the choice
or order of the chapters. The emphasis is clearly on recent
developments in land or near shore mapping using data from
aircraft or orbit, not strictly imagery. Thus LiDAR receives
considerable and useful discussion in chapters 2 and 7, with
sections in other chapters as well. The use of interferometric
synthetic aperture radar (SAR) for measuring elevation and
elevation changes is very well covered in chapters 4, 5 and
14. Chapters 5 and 14 include some of the relevant basic
equations, with adequate context to appreciate how they both
constrain and enable the measurements. Chapter 15 covers
detection of oil spills in the marine environment by SAR.
To a large extent the book could be considered to have two
types of chapters, those that are general discussions of a topic,
and those that utilize a limited number of data sets, algorithms
for a limited application. In the former this reviewer places
chapters:
• 1 Modern photogrammetric mapping
• 2 Airborne LiDAR
• 4 Global digital elevationmodel development from satellite
remotes-sensing data
• 5 Digital elevation model generation from satellite
interferometric SAR
• 6 Shore line mapping
• 10 Estimating and mapping forest least area index using
satellite imagery
• 16 Remote-sensing techniques for natural disaster impact
assessment
In general these chapters provide good discussions of
recent advancements in their respective topics. Chapter 10 is
especially good. It provides a context for understanding the
recent advances by presenting an overview of the relevant
problems and approaches for dealing with them.
The remaining chapters, listed below, while useful to some
readers deliver less than the book and chapter titles suggest.
These would be better labeled as case studies. The authors
of chapters 8, 9, 12 and 13 explicitly acknowledged the
limitation on significance imposed by their restricted choices.
Regrettably, the other authors do not do so, leaving the reader
without guidance on applicability. If anyone is interested in
the book specifically for one or two of these chapters, I would
instead recommend using the author’s journal publications as
