IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2017 - 3

FROM THE EDITOR
BY LORENZO BRUZZONE

A Farewell from the
Founding Editor-in-Chief

his is the last issue of 2017 for IEEE Geoscience and
Remote Sensing Magazine (GRSM) and also my final
"From the Editor" column as the magazine's editor-inchief. It has been a great pleasure and an honor for me
to have guided the creation and evolution of this magazine since 2013. GRSM was established to fill a gap in the
publication portfolio of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote
Sensing Society (GRSS). After five years, I think we can
agree that, thanks to the work of many colleagues, this
gap has been filled, and the magazine has matured very
successfully. This is evidenced by the increasing number
of submissions; the broad interest raised by the tutorial,
technical, and feature articles; and the relatively high
number of citations the articles have received.
Moreover, the large number and diversity of columns
published in this magazine provide the opportunity to
address and stimulate discussion about very specific
topics relevant to our field. These columns also increase
our visibility by encouraging the community at large to
take notice of the important activities carried out within
the GRSS in terms of Chapters, education, and technical
committees. Consequently, more GRSS members and
other interested people can be inspired to become involved in these valuable initiatives.
The success of GRSM is confirmed by some very recent achievements. In 2016, Thomson Reuters products
and services began to include GRSM, and, in June 2017,
the magazine appeared in the Clarivate Analytics Journal
Citation Report, thus having received its first bibliometric
indicator values. The three-year impact factor (IF) of the
magazine is 2.676, while the five-year IF is 4.104. These
scores are excellent and represent an important recognition of GRSM's quality and popularity.
I would like to mention that the results achieved by
GRSM are due to the contributions of a large number of
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MGRS.2017.2768699
Date of publication: 27 December 2017

DECEMBER 2017

IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING MAGAZINE

colleagues, including all editorial board members, the
reviewers, the GRSM assistant, and the IEEE staff supporting this magazine's production. These people have
all played a fundamental role in the success of this initiative. I would also like to point out the strong support
received from the GRSS Administrative Committee and,
in particular, from the GRSS presidents during these
years: Prof. Melba Crawford, Prof. Kamal Sarabandi,
and Prof. Adriano Camps. Without their vision, support, and constant encouragement, these results would
not have been achieved.
IN THIS ISSUE
This issue includes three feature articles. The first, "Deep
Learning in Remote Sensing," provides a tutorial on deep
learning, which has proven to be a very powerful approach to the analysis of large quantities of data in many
fields. The article addresses the relevance of deep learning in geoscience and remote sensing and provides a
critical analysis of its advantages and disadvantages, reporting on the current challenges, recent advances, and
resources for exploiting deep learning algorithms.
The second feature article, "Advances in Hyperspectral Image and Signal Processing," presents a comprehensive tutorial/overview on hyperspectral data analysis by
considering seven main topics: automatic classification,
spectral unmixing, dimensionality reduction, resolution
enhancement, image denoising and restoration, change
detection, and fast computing. For each topic, the article
briefly addresses the state-of-the-art approaches and numerical results for validation and evaluation of different
methodologies, followed by a discussion of future challenges and research directions.
The third article, "HyperLabelMe," introduces a web
platform designed for the automatic benchmarking of
remote-sensing image classifiers. The HyperLabelMe
platform offers to registered users large data sets of
multispectral and hyperspectral images with different
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2017