IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - March 2021 - 282

IN MEMORIAM

David Landgrebe (1934-2020)

he international remote sensing community has lost
one of its true pioneers. Professor Emeritus David Allen Landgrebe of Purdue University passed away on 21
November 2020 after a brief illness. The field of quantitative remote sensing as we now know it was greatly
influenced by Dave. As practitioners and analysts, we
are all very much in his debt for the legacy he left, not
only through his technical accomplishments but also by
his leadership.
Among his many groundbreaking contributions,
he helped establish the designs of the first three Landsat satellites in 1967-1968 through his chairmanship
of the Sensors and Data Systems Panel of the National
Research Council's Study on Peaceful Uses of Earth Oriented Satellites, and, in 1975, he chaired the NASA Thematic Mapper (TM) Working Group, which defined the
spectral bands and system parameters for the TM flown
on Landsat 4 and 5.
Importantly, he was one of the originators of the
concept of multispectral sensing for deriving information about Earth's land resources from aircraft
and spacecraft. From as early as 1966, he pioneered
the use of pattern recognition techniques for identifying and mapping land-cover types from multispectral image data. In an era where we are now
consumed with the use of deep learning applied to
multispectral and hyperspectral image data, it is fitting to pause and recognize that it all started with
Dave's bringing his experience in signal processing
to bear on image analysis using maximum likelihood estimation. Although that was 50 years ago, it
laid the very basis for the field of quantitative remote
sensing. Similarly, Dave was a champion of hyperspectral imaging and pioneered the development of

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MGRS.2020.3048297
Date of current version: 8 March 2021

282

algorithms to address the associated opportunities
and challenges in its analysis.
Dave was born in Huntingburg, a small town in
Indiana now known as the place where the movie A
League of Their Own was filmed; and, indeed, Dave went
on to a pathfinding career in a league of his own. Dave
caught the engineering bug early from his father, who
always wanted to be an engineer. Dave's dad must
have been proud when
he enrolled at Purdue
in 1952, ult imately
DAVE WAS A CHAMPION
earning his B.S.E.E.,
OF HYPERSPECTRAL
M.S.E.E., and Ph.D.
IMAGING AND PIONEERED
degrees in 1956, 1958,
THE DEVELOPMENT OF
and 1962, respectively.
ALGORITHMS TO ADDRESS
Dave spent time in industry, but his heart
THE ASSOCIATED
was in academia, workOPPORTUNITIES AND
ing with students and
CHALLENGES IN ITS
being at the cutting
ANALYSIS.
edge of research. With
his newly minted engineering Ph.D., Dave
embarked on a lifelong career at Purdue as a teacher and
scholar. He also served terms as acting head and coordinator of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) graduate programs and as Associate Dean
of Engineering.
As with his scholarly work in general, Dave's career
at Purdue was distinguished. He served as the director of
Purdue's internationally recognized Laboratory for Applications of Remote Sensing (LARS) from 1969 to 1981. During
his tenure, the staff of the laboratory and its funding both
grew tenfold. Much of the groundwork for the applications of remote sensing in agriculture, forestry, and soil
science was established under him as director of LARS,
(continued on p. 286)
IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING MAGAZINE

MARCH 2021

IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - March 2021

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