The European Association of Remote Sensing Laboratories,
Tel Aviv University
and
the Israel Space Agency

6th EARSeL SIG IS workshop

IMAGING SPECTROSCOPY:

Innovative tool for scientific

and commercial environmental applications

16 - 19   March 2009

Location: Tel- Aviv University, Tel- Aviv, Israel
In co-organization with ISPRS technical commission VIII/12 Geological Mapping,
Geomorphology and Geomorphometry

and

ISPRS technical commission VII/4 "Information extraction from
hyperspectral data"

Symposium Chair
Prof. Dr. Eyal Ben-Dor, Tel Aviv University (Israel)

The Workshop will take place at Beith Hatfuzot (The Diaspora Museum)

(Enlarge the picture)

General
EARSeL’s Special Interest Group on Imaging Spectroscopy is a forum whose aim is to encourage international discussions among specialists working with this innovative Earth Observation technology. The forum was founded by EARSeL at the  University of Zurich in 1999, led by RSL, who conducted the first workshop.  Since then, four more very successful workshops were held at ITC Enschede, the Netherlands (2001), DLR Herrsching, Germany  (2003), the University of Warsaw, Warsaw,  Poland (2005), and VITO, Brugge, Belgium (2007). The next workshop will take place at the University of Tel-Aviv, Israel during the spring of 2009.

Imaging Spectroscopy
Imaging spectroscopy (IS) brings a new dimension to the field of remote sensing by enlarging the envelope of point spectrometry into a spatial domain. It now provides a tangible perspective for adding spatial detail to spectral information, thereby enhancing the thematic application of spectral recognition algorithms. This capability can be provided either from far or close distances, such as those acquired by satellites or by microscopic sensors, respectively. Whereas the former is used for mapping the earth from space, the latter is used for mapping micro targets such as microorganisms and cell bodies in order to account for their biochemical processes in a spatial domain. Despite years of accumulating evidence from spectral studies of organic and inorganic material, IS technology is still considered a novel means of remote sensing that has not yet been fully utilized for many applications. Schaepman et al. (2007) pointed out that a significantly increasing amount of internet browsing in this field has been evident over the past few years.