Machine Learning for Advanced Remote Sensing: From Theory to Applications and Societal Impact

This Research Topic aims to translate state-of-the-art machine-learning theory into operational remote-sensing applications that deliver measurable societal value. A distinctive focus of this collection will be the end-to-end integration of novel machine learning with rigorous spatial statistics to create trustworthy, actionable knowledge for society, policy and public good. We organise the agenda around three guiding questions:

• Scalability: How can foundation models, continual/incremental learning, and cross-sensor data fusion overcome limited labels, domain shift, and platform heterogeneity at the global scale?
• Reliability: Which interpretability techniques, spatial-uncertainty metrics, and causal-inference frameworks make machine-learning outputs credible for policy, safety-critical, and mission-critical decisions?
• Societal Impact: In what concrete ways can machine-learning pipelines advance climate resilience, sustainable development, and smart-city governance, and how should those benefits be quantified?

By convening method developers, spanning segmentation, detection, super-resolution, LLM-augmented reasoning, and UAV path-planning, with domain experts in health geography, urban visual intelligence, 3-D city modelling, and low-altitude applications, this topic will chart a coherent research roadmap and publish reproducible exemplars that move the field beyond algorithmic novelty toward demonstrable public good.

We welcome Original Research, Methods, Brief Research Reports, Data Reports, and Review articles. Suggested, but not limited to, themes include:

• Foundational theories and self-supervised learning for multi-sensor data
• Methodological advances in classification, semantic segmentation, object & change detection, and domain adaptation
• Image enhancement including super-resolution, cloud removal, deblurring and denoising
• LLM-enabled geospatial reasoning and multi-modal prompt engineering
• Low-altitude economy applications for remote sensing and their associated economic or societal evaluations
• UAV-based remote sensing, including perception, safety-critical operations, mission planning, and edge intelligence for onboard inference
• Urban visual intelligence & 3-D city modelling for sustainable development and carbon accounting
• Spatial life course health & health geography integrating EO, census, and clinical datasets
• Uncertainty quantification, explainable machine learning, and reproducibility frameworks
• Societal and ethical impact assessments of machine-learning-enabled remote sensing

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: remote sensing, machine learning, methodological advances, practical applications, societal impact, semantic segmentation, super resolution, detection, classification, UAV, low altitude economy, urban visual intelligence, spatial lifecourse health, data

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.