  Non-optical remote-sensed images are going to be used more often in man-
aging disaster, crime and precision agriculture. With more small satellites and
unmanned air vehicles planning to carry radar and hyperspectral image sensors
there is going to be an abundance of such data in the recent future.
Understanding these data in real-time will be crucial in attaining some of the
important sustain- able development goals. Processing non-optical images is, in
many ways, different from that of optical images. Most of the recent advances
in the domain of image understanding has been using optical images. In this
article we shall explain the needs for image understanding in non-optical
domain and the typical challenges. Then we shall describe the existing
approaches and how we can move from there to the desired goal of a reliable
real-time image understanding system.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition