Using the IPOL Journal for Online Reproducible Research in Remote Sensing

Abstract

Reproducible research is needed to ensure that scientific results in the literature are reliable, unbiased, and verifiable by others. The journal Image Processing On Line (IPOL) publishes reproducible articles since 2010. This means publishing an algorithm by a literary description, a pseudo-code, its source code, a series of test examples, an online facility allowing to test the code on this data and other data submitted by the user, and finally an experimental archive. In this work we discuss how to publish and review reproducible research in the specific discipline of remote sensing. We put a special emphasis on the construction and proper documentation of public datasets. We show case studies of remote sensing articles publicly available in IPOL, which demonstrate the feasibility of reproducible research in this area. The methods and their application are explained, along with details on how the datasets were built and made available for evaluation, comparison, and scoring to eventually help establish a reliable state of the art of the discipline. Finally, we give specific recommendations for authors and editors willing to publish reproducible research in remote sensing.

Development Efforts for Reproducible Research: Platform, Library and Editorial Investment

“…IPOL is a research journal on reproducible algorithms, focusing on their mathematical details [26]. It started as an image-processing journal, but soon it added other data types, such as video or audio, among others, as well as other applications, including remote sensing [27] or even biomedical [28], among others.…”

“…Interactive map GeoJSON demos The opening of IPOL to more diverse research fields required to improve its underlying infrastructure to support new data types, especially in the web interface. In particular, IPOL has already published several articles on remote sensing, along with the associated demos [27]. One request from users and authors was the possibility to draw one or more polygonal regions on a map and to save them in the standard GeoJSON format (standardized by the IETF as RFC 7946).…”

The approach to reproducible research of the Image Processing On Line (IPOL) journal

“…IPOL started as a journal focused exclusively on Image Processing, but soon it expanded to other disciplines, for example Remote Sensing (Colom et al, 2020) and data types other than images, including audio, video and even physiological data. Every article in IPOL comes along with an online demo which allows users to test the algorithms with the proposed or their own data, thus allowing for reproducible research.…”

Context for Reproducibility and Replicability in Geospatial Unmanned Aircraft Systems

“…This is part of their initiative to increase R&R in the sciences and it helps researchers by offering outside motivations to create reproducible research while also helping encourage other journals to implement requirements of source data publication alongside article publication. Colom et al [91] reviewed a journal that publishes not only literary descriptions of work, but also source code, a series of test examples, and online environments where other researchers may test code. Efforts like these exemplify the changes to publication methods that can promote R&R among research in all disciplines.…”