It’s probably impossible to go to a conference without picking up some kind of idea of the current trends in the areas being discussed. IGARSS 2008 was certainly no exception. Here’s a list of what I think were probably the most trendy techniques in remote sensing. You can probably make a list like this just by graphing the frequency of word use:

• Classification
  • Support Vector Machines
  • Markov segmentation
• geostatistics - Last time I looked at wikipedia’s geostatistics entry it was very highly biased. Watch out!
• Kriging – less mentioned, but heavily used.
• Pan-sharpening
• mathematical morphology - Although interestingly, nothing as modern as attribute morphology.

And trendy instrument types:

• Hyperspectral-anything!
• Synthetic Aperture Radar SAR
• LiDAR

So there you have it… the must use remote sensing techniques for 2008! I’m sure I’ve missed some though.