The first remote sensing thesis I supervised was completed by Captain Melissa Sturgeon. This thesis analyzed AOTF spectral data from JPL. This work was published as a SPIE paper, "Spectral and polarimetric analysis of hyperspectral data collected by an acousto-optic tunable filter system." (Spectral and polarimetric analysis of hyperspectral data collected by an acousto-optic tunable filter system.), SPIE, 1994.  This analysis preceded ENVI software.

One of my first thesis students, Mark Landers, started HYDICE. This same student is now the CEO and president of the growing remote sensing corporation, SpecTIR.

One of my best students was Marine Captain Marcus Stefanou. He completed a survey of the existing statistics based analysis techniques for spectral imagery that is still a reference standard for the field: "A Signal Processing Perspective of Hyperspectral Imagery Analysis Techniques." He is now an AF Lt. Colonel, working on his PhD at RIT under the direction of John Kerekes.

Several NPS thesis students completed work in the area of bathymetry. Research using the hyperspectral character of the HYDICE data to take out bottom reflectance variations proved successful. A thesis titled "Bathymetry From Hyperspectral Imagery" (currently unpublished) captured the results of Lt. Doug Stuffles thesis project. Tom Fisher applied Stuffle's techniques to AVIRIS data. The results of this work can be found in "Shallow Water Bathymetry At Lake Tahoe From AVIRIS Data."

The remote sensing center has completed classified work on Long Wave Infrared (LWIR) spectral imaging. In an attempt to break out of the classified arena, Marine Captain Aimee Mares visited the University of Hawaii to work with Dr. Paul Lucey. She brought home some of the first volcano measurements taken in the LWIR. LWIR Spectral measurements of volcanic sulfur dioxide plumes. Previously, Brian Collins (another Marine) had worked with John Hackwell at Aerospace, and did an outstanding job working with SEBASS. Thermal Spectral Imagery Analysis is the SPIE paper from that work. His thesis is here.

For a short time I had a good working relationship with Kip Krebs from the OR department, and Scott Tyo from ECE.  Kip, however has discontinued his academic work in this field.  After his departure, our human factors work soon ended.   Scott, an AF Captain, left the AF, and he is now as Associate Professor at the University of Arizona.  The work with Scott has continued, and we have a nice paper on invariant display strategies.  Principal-Components-Based Display Strategy for Spectral Imagery

The commercial imagery systems, such as Quickbird and IKONOS, are likely future of remote sensing.  One of our early studies on spectral imaging with IKONOS was a study of the Elkhorn Slough.   Terrain Classification in Urban Wetlands with High-spatial Resolution Multi-spectral Imagery,

In the latter half of 2004, I had a post-doc, of sorts, from Taiwan.  Brandt Tso came over for a break from his regular duties, and worked terribly hard on spectral imaging, adapting Markov Fields concepts to spectral classification.  He took some unique, multiangle observations I had from Quickbird, and looked at angular (BDRF) and texture effects.  Here is the SPIE talk.   Scene classification using combined spectral, textural and contextual information.    The publications on his Markov random field work while in Monterey are: A contextual classification scheme based on MRF model with improved parameters estimation and multiscale fuzzy line process,    and  Combining spectral and spatial information into hidden Markov models for unsupervised image classification, 

My version of the look at the multi-angle data was given at the same conference - Multilook scene classification with spectral imagery

Lately, we have focused on terrain classification to avoid helicopter brownout - basically selecting landing zones that minimize danger to pilots. Anthony Davis has a thesis effort using civil systems, completed in September 2007.

Thesis

The Use Of Commercial Remote Sensing In Predicting Helicopter Brownout Conditions
Anthony W Davis Jr.- Lieutenant, United States Navy
September 2007
Advisor: Richard Olsen
Second Reader: David Trask