Suggestions on the Selection of Satellite Imagery for Future Remote Sensing-Based Humanitarian Applications

Satellite imagery is an important information source for research on remote sensing (RS)based humanitarian applications. The selection of satellite imagery is one of the most important steps for such research. This paper firstly shows the selection of satellite imagery in past research from 2015 to 2021. It can be found that most research on land cover and land use (LCLU) change caused by conflicts or refugees/internally displaced persons (IDPs) chose medium spatial resolution (MSR) imagery. Most research on dwelling detection of refugee/IDP camps applied high or very high spatial resolution (HSR/VHSR) imagery. There is much research that applied multiple types of satellite imagery for humanitarian applications. Then, the paper presents general characteristics of commonly available optical satellite imagery. Next, with the development of sensors, this paper suggests that data fusion of SPOT5 and Sentinel-2 may be helpful in LCLU change detection caused by refugees/IDPs or conflicts. Smallsat imagery may be promising for research on humanitarian applications that require a high temporal frequency of imagery.