Jay Gao’s book on the analysis of remote sensing imagery is a well-written, easy-to-read, and informative text best serving graduate students in geosciences, and practitioners in the field of digital image analysis. Although Dr. Gao states that he has targeted his book at upper-level undergraduates and lower-level postgraduate students, its rigor and depth of mathematical analysis would challenge most students without prior experience in remote sensing and college-level mathematics. The book covers a lot of ground quickly, beginning with a basic explanation of pixels, digital numbers and histograms and advancing rapidly through a description of the most well-known satellite systems to data storage formats, rectification and classification. It best serves students who have already taken an introductory course in remote sensing. Following a three-chapter description of the basics the remaining eleven chapters are dedicated to the description of the most common image processing systems and the details of the image analysis functions which can be carried out. The largest portion of the text covers classification – spectral and spatial, neural networks, decision trees and expert systems – and is an invaluable reference to anyone interested in understanding image analysis terminology and the algorithms behind these different systems. The last chapter of the text is addressed to practitioners wishing to integrate remote sensing image data with GIS and/or GPS data. The text is nicely structured so that individual chapters can easily be skipped when their content is not of interest to the reader without impairing the understanding of later chapters.

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