José Bioucas Dias, from IT in Lisbon, has received the IEEE GRSS David Landgrebe Award. This career award is attributed biennially by the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) Special Awards Committee to an IEEE GRSS member for “outstanding contributions in the field of remote sensing image analysis”.

Remote sensing imaging is related with the acquisition of images about objects or phenomena without making physical contact with them, as opposed to on-site observations. The acquisition of images is usually carried out by cameras onboard spaceborne or airborne platforms. According to José Bioucas Dias, “Remote sensing imaging is used in numerous fields such as Agriculture, Forestry, Weather, and Biodiversity. Examples of specific applications are the generation of digital elevation maps (DEMs) and the detection of oil spills in the ocean, using radar images, the identification of crops, using hyperspectral images (color images with hundreds of colors), and the measurement of rain intensity, using weather radar images”.

“My scientific contributions to remote sensing imaging analysis have been mostly devoted to the solution of imaging inverse problems, whose objective is to restore clean images from degraded versions thereof. Although many of the contributions apply to a large class of imaging modalities, they have been often motivated and applied to remote sensing images, typically acquired by sensors onboard satellites or on other low altitude platforms. Examples of image restoration problems in which I've worked are noise removing, deblurring, DEM estimation, rain intensity estimation, material identification and classification, and oil spill detection”, said the awarded IT researcher.

José Bioucas Dias will receive the award at the Awards Banquet of the 2017 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, being held this July 23-28 in Forth Worth, Texas, USA.