Remote sensing big data computing: Challenges and opportunities

•This paper identifies the properties and features of remote sensing big data.•This paper reviews the stat-of-the-arts of remote sensing big data computing.•This paper discusses the “data-intensive computing” issues in remote sensing big data processing.

As we have entered an era of high resolution earth observation, the RS data are undergoing an explosive growth. The proliferation of data also give rise to the increasing complexity of RS data, like the diversity and higher dimensionality characteristic of the data. RS data are regarded as RS “Big Data”. Fortunately, we are witness the coming technological leapfrogging. In this paper, we give a brief overview on the Big Data and data-intensive problems, including the analysis of RS Big Data, Big Data challenges, current techniques and works for processing RS Big Data.