ESRI has gotten much more serious about imagery over the past few years, with the addition of Laurie Jordan the founder of ERDAS as director of imagery. Each presentation on the main stage plenary included imagery, and the company is serious about building an imagery-friendly platform that has been greatly enhanced with ArcGIS 10.
A year ago we were moving beyond seeing imagery as a backdrop. Through ESRI’s partnership with ITT Corporation’s ENVI image processing and analysis software, imagery now becomes more core to GIS, to give professionals the geospatial advantage, and to manage imagery as part of a holistic information management systems that can incorporate current and accurate information from imagery.
With ArcGIS 10 users can load, view and even perform basic analysis. This base-level functionality serves as an improved platform for ITT to enable more in-depth analysis. The next phase of this partnership delivers new ENVI tools for both desktop and server. The aim is a seamless workflow with an improved user interface to make the use of the tools easier, and to allow the richer exploiting of imagery to gain a better contextual understanding.
ENVI Tools for ArcGIS are accessible seamlessly within the toolbox. You can also access them within the model builder tool for more complex workflows. ENVI for ArcGIS Server is a new discrete product that is a server version of ENVI that is scalable and extensible. It allows a lot of new functionality and capabilities with concurrent processing, and server-class processing hardware.
The Server product will have a standard and advanced version, with a host of pre-built services. ENVI enables further customization through the ArcGIS Python interface that can be enhanced with ENVI’s IDL language to create custom analysis and models in any way that users want.
The advancement of imagery is making it a much more critical information source, both with sensor feedback (into multispectral, LIDAR, radar, etc.) and the amount of sensors that are out there. The fusion of different sensor types is where this more advanced image analysis technology plays. The number of sensors, and fusion capabilities, offer the opportunity for in-depth change detection to determine the impacts of global change.
These ENVI server and desktop products launch in October, but are being demoed in the ITT Booth (#1515) on the show floor of ESRI International User Conference.
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I still find it fascinating that the major software companies (ERDAS, ESRI, BAE and ENVI) offer next to nothing in the way of LiDAR support. It is almost as if LiDAR is the forgotten sensor from the standpoint of the software companies despite its usage in all levels of government and across numerous industries.
ITT has shown me LIDAR capability to handle millions of points that is scheduled for fall release as well. Seems that it has taken them some time for image processing companies to wrap their minds around LIDAR as a sensor output, but I’m sure they’ll all get there soon.