Chapter 6. Python and Remote Sensing

In this chapter, we will discuss Remote Sensing. This field grows more exciting every day as more satellites are launched and the distribution of data becomes easier. The high availability of satellite and aerial images, as well as interesting new types of sensors launching each year is changing the role remote sensing plays in understanding our world.

And in this field, Python is quite capable. However, in this chapter we will rely more on Python bindings to C libraries than we have in the previous chapters, where the focus was more on using pure Python. The only reason for this change is the size and complexity of remotely sensed data. In remote sensing, we step through each pixel in an image and perform some form of query or mathematical process. An image can be thought of as a large numerical array. And in remote sensing these arrays can be quite large on the order of tens of megabytes to several gigabytes. While Python is fast, only C...