Acronyms and Key Concepts in Remote Sensing

AOI: Area of Interest.

ARD: Analysis Ready Data

ARVI: Atmospherically Resistant Vegetation Index.

AVHRR: Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer.

Azimuth: This is the angle between a reference direction and the line between the observer/sensor and a specific point of interest on the ground.

CART: Classification and Regression Trees builds a tree-like structure where splits are based on the features that yield optimal separation the data.

DEM/DSM/DTM: Digital Elevation Model / Digital Surface Model / Digital Terrain Model. This article and explains well the differences between DEM, DTM and DSM.

EO: Earth Observation, usually used as “EO Data”.

EOS: Earth Observing System.

ESA: European Space Agency.

EuroSAT: Papers with Code: “a dataset and deep learning benchmark for land use and land cover classification.”

EVI: Enhanced Vegetation Index.

GIS: Geographic Information System.

GAUL: Global Administrative Unit Layer is defined: “compiles and disseminates the best available information on administrative units for all the countries in the world, providing a contribution to the standardization of the spatial dataset representing administrative units.”.

GLCM: Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrix. This lecture note is really helpful in understanding the details of GLCM.

GNDVI: Green Normalized Difference Vegetation Index.

GOES: Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite.

GSO: Geosynchronous Orbit, this is an orbit where, from the observer’s (directly on the ground below the point of the object in orbit) reference frame, the object in orbit is stationary. More detailed explanation is found here.

IFOV: Instantaneous Field of View. Refers to the area on the ground, that a sensor in orbit can see and measure whenever it is ordered to.

LandSat: Land Satellite, more details on deciding which Landsat collection to import see here.

LiDAR: Light Detection and Ranging.

LULC: Land Use and Land Cover.

MODIS: Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer.

MSAVI: Modified Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index.

NDMI: Normalized Difference Moisture Index..

NDVI: Normalized Difference Vegetation Index.

NDWI: Normalized Difference Water Index.

NOAA: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

PCA: Principal Component Analysis, a statistical technique used to reduce data dimensionality, prioritising significant features by transforming correlated bands into uncorrelated components.

POI: Point of Interest.

RF: Random Forest.

ROI: Region of Interest.

SAVI: Soil-Adjusted Vegetation Index.

SNAP: Sentinel Application Platform, a software platform used for processing and analyzing satellite data, mostly European Space Agency’s Sentinel series Earth Observation data.

SVM: Support Vector Machine.

UAV: Unmanned Aerial Vehicle.