State of Geographic Information Science (GIS), Spatial Analysis (SA) and Remote Sensing (RS) in India: A Machine Learning Perspective

The past decade has witnessed India making significant progress in the spheres of computer science and space engineering. Coupled with the increased frequency of successful satellite launches, a huge amount of geospatial data has now become available in the government repositories, empowering the concerned authorities in making quicker decisions and better policies. Resource monitoring and disaster prediction and management are two of the most crucial fields employing these advancements and indulge in a prolific consumption of the earth observation data being captured by the Indian satellites. The paper reviews the work accomplished in the aforementioned fields using the state-of-the-art sciences of geographical information science (GIS), remote sensing (RS), spatial analysis (SA), and machine learning (ML) in the Indian landscape in the past decade. The emphasis is on finding the impact of machine learning techniques on these earth data studies for finding interesting patterns in resource potential mappings, and hazard susceptibility and vulnerability studies are conducted. It was observed in the study that high prediction accuracies were achieved with the employment of the latest data analysis techniques for geospatial mapping for predicting the future occurrence of specific object/event/phenomenon on the earth’s surface. The field holds enormous potential for environmental assessment and preservation and sustainable city planning and development.