Application of Information from Remote Sensing Earth Systems to Solve Problems of Environmental Monitoring

The chapter proposes the application of information from remote sensing Earth systems to solve problems of environmental monitoring. It is proposed to use satellite imagery taking into account the main advantages of space-based optical-electronic systems. The stages of processing the obtained satellite imagery are considered. It has been established that the segmentation operation is the main one at the stage of image processing. The division of all existing methods of segmentation into two main groups is presented. It has been established that to solve problems of environmental monitoring it is better to use a group of methods of area detection. It is proposed to use the k-means method for segmentation of satellite imagery from the group of methods of area detection. It has been established that to solve problems of environmental monitoring it is not enough to segmentation satellite imagery into two segments. Segmentation of a real satellite imagery was carried out using the k-means method with a different number of segments. Visual analysis of segmented imagery showed that for solving environmental monitoring problems the optimal number of k is 3 or 4.