PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
May 2015
359
BOOK
REVIEW
Thermal Infrared Remote Sensing:
Sensors, Methods, Applications
Claudia Kuenzer and Stefan Dech, editors
Springer: 2013. 537 p., 235 illus., 162 illus. in color. $139.00
(eBook, ISBN 978-94-007-6639-6), $179 (Hardcover, ISBN
978-94-007-6638-9).
Reviewed by
Doug Rickman, Applied Science
Team Lead, Earth Science Office, Marshall Space
Flight Center, National Aeronautics and Space
Administration.
This book delivers exactly what the title promises. The editors
of this book are to be congratulated for an excellent job, as are
the publisher and the authors.
What is first apparent is the physical characteristics of book
beginning with the clean cover design and quality binding.
The paper is esthetically pleasing, acid-free, high whiteness,
and glossy. Therefore, the text, equations, and illustrations,
especially the abundant color images, are easy to read. The
indexing is reasonably thorough. The only deficit, the lack of
an editor’s preface, could usefully have explained to readers
their intent for the book.
Instead, the editors provide an introductory chapter in
which they review the basic physics of thermal-wavelength,
electromagnetic radiation and introduce several broad topical
categories more or less related to subsequent chapters. Your
reviewer, who was hired by NASA to work with the future
TIMS instrument, has frequently observed that individuals
who are not accustomed to working with thermal imagery,
frequently slip into thought processes related to remote
sensing of reflected energies. Instantaneously, thermal
remote sensing is working with two independent properties,
the temperature and emissivity of a surface. The former is
extrinsic and the latter is intrinsic. This compares to the single
intrinsic property, reflectance, used in visible and near-IR
remote sensing. Critically, the intrinsic property, emissivity,
is essentially independent of environmental variables. This is
in marked contrast to reflected spectra, which integrate both
the desired intrinsic property and the spectral variation of
the illumination. In thermal imagery, the extrinsic variable,
temperature, does integrate a substantial number of variables.
There are multiple processes for heat gain and loss, and there
is also storage and conductivity to consider. For example,
heating gains may come from the Sun, vegetation fires,
burning coal seams, or geothermal energy. Heat losses may
occur through radiation to the sky, evaporation, conduction,
or mass transfers. Some of the mechanisms implied in the
processes are temporally variable on multiple scales. The
obvious example is solar radiation, which varies hourly, daily
and seasonally. The processes also vary spatially. Slope and
aspect affect illumination. Geology and soils affect conductivity
and capacity. The physics provided in chapter 1 definitely
helps to set the right conceptual framework, and is likely quite
sufficient for many users of the text.
In their introductory chapter and throughout the rest of the
text, the editors provide an accurate chapter abstract. Sections
and subsections of each chapter are numbered, so following
the development of a chapter is easy. With few exceptions,
the figures and their contained text are easily legible. In
part this is due to the use of high quality paper, but it is also
something the editors almost certainly had to demand from
some of the authors. Each chapter includes a robust list of
references. Significantly, the intellectual content of a chapter
is substantially original, rather than modest reworking of
published papers, and delivers on what the chapter title
suggests. Further, the writing style, which is lucid, and the
assumed target audience have both been made consistent
across the chapters. I found nothing that I considered opaque
or overly simplified. Much of this clearly is to the editors’
credit.
Chapters 2, 3, 13 and 25 deal with calibration, spectroscopy,
and correction of thermal data. Chapters 5, 6, 8, and 9 deal
with sensors. Chapters 4 and 7 deal with platforms. Chapters
10, 11, 12 and 14 discuss data analysis and cross platform
comparisons. Together, these fill half of the book. All are
topics that often get short shrift, if they get any attention at
all, but are very important in practical applications. In this
text there is considerably more information on these topics
than your reviewer has previously seen in one place. Their
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