The five papers in this special section focus on computer vision-based approaches for Earth observation. These papers followed a series of events promoting works at the interface between computer vision and remote sensing: the special sessions organized at the Living Planet Symposium1 and the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference (the EarthVision2 and Computer Vision for Global Challenges3 workshops). These sessions aimed at fostering collaboration between the computer vision and earth observation communities to boost automated interpretation of remotely sensed data. They also aimed at raising awareness inside the computer vision community for this highly challenging and quickly evolving field of research with a big impact on human society, economy, industry, and the planet. Submissions were invited from all areas of computer vision and image analysis relevant for, or applied to environmental remote sensing and were not limited to the papers presented at the events above. The papers retained in this special issue reflect the high variety of automatic image analysis in remote sensing.