VOLUNTEERED REMOTE SENSING USING HANDHELD CAMERAS IN A PASSENGER AIRCRAFT

Remote sensing satellites are playing very important roles in diverse earth observation fields. However, long revisit period, high cost and dense cloud cover have been the main drawbacks of satellite remote sensing for a long time. This paper introduces the novel volunteered passenger aircraft remote sensing (VPARS) concept, which can partly overcome these problems. By obtaining aerial imaging data from passengers using a portable smartphone on a passenger aircraft, it has various advantages including low cost, high revisit, dense coverage, and partial anti-cloud, which can well complement conventional remote sensing data. This paper also examines several issues associated with this concept: why is the type of data needed, how can it be consistently acquired, what are some rules that should be used to acquire the data, what pre-processing is needed, what are some application that could benefit from the data and what are the limitations and pitfalls?