The field of satellite sensing/imaging is still in full expansion. The new millennium will see developments related not only to scientific missions, but also an explosion of commercial satellite systems providing data that will have economic and sociopolitical implications, with telecommunications taking a large place in the space market. In space, returning to the Moon and Mars, as well as exploring distant planets will see a growing number of distant satellite systems providing unprecedented amounts of data to analyze. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is merely one recent example of such systems. Automatic, accurate, fast, and reliable image registration will increase the success of these future endeavors by providing data products that will foster interdisciplinary research and fast turnaround of information for applications with societal benefits.

This book has brought together invited contributions by 36 distinguished researchers in the field to present a coherent and detailed overview of current research and practice in the application of image registration to satellite imagery. The contributions cover the definition of the problem, theoretical issues in accuracy and efficiency, fundamental algorithms used in its solution, and real world case studies of image registration software applied to imagery from operational satellite systems.

As the field keeps evolving, we anticipate that new research will deal with combining multiple band-to-band registrations, extending 3D medical registration methodologies (Goshtasby, 2005; Hainal et al., 2001) to the registration of hyperspectral data, and automatically extracting windows of interest (Plaza et al., 2007) to guide more refined registration techniques.