December 2007
Interview
Robert Moses
CEO & President
PCI Geomatics, Canada
Algorithms for near real time
image analysis are today’s need
IMAGE CENTRIC
COMPANY
Around 1985-86 we entered
the image processing and
remote sensing market space
as a result of Canadian government’s
project related to
the working of satellite remote
sensing applications on a parallel
processor. In those days
we were in the middle of the
cold war and the government
was trying to access crop
yields of Russia, China and
other Asian countries, to try
and predict whether there was
food shortage, etc. Today we
use the same technology for
the commodities markets.
This eventually resulted in
development of the PCI Geomatica
software suite, which
we were selling with package
deals at USD 50,000. Later,
with rapidly developing IT
industry and lowering software
prices, the similar packages
were sold at USD 5000,
which in turn led to strategic
decision making with a business
point of view.
We realised we had to expand
but could not compete ESRI
and other well established
vector based GIS companies.
At the time, satellites sector
was growing at a very fast
rate, both in commercial and
secret government national
assets all over the world. It
then occurred to us, about
7-8 years ago, that there will
be a bottleneck in the industry
both in terms of processing
of the massive collection of
data and its analysis for user
specific applications. In order
to succeed in our endeavour
we had to convince the
government departments
about our presumptions and
the need for image centric
software and solutions.
We successfully convinced
three departments - Defence,
Homeland and Security and
Natural Resources. They
then sponsored us for a
large project within Canada
and a technology partnership
fund was allocated to create
the building blocks for an
image centric scriptable type
of systems.
RASTER V/S VECTOR
Once we realised that the
image centric market was an
open space and if we could
possess it correctly and create
a system around it much like
the systems around the vector
methodologies, we could help
battle the bottlenecks like processing
and analysis of the
image data.
In the past, basically we used
vector methodologies with an
image backdrop, but I recommended
the use of image
technology with a vector backdrop;
to use vector data and
attributes that we gather to
help process the image, not
vice versa.
We developed certain applications
that were much easier to
do because of raster nature of
the data and also easier to
automate the process in certain
respects. We could
process all that data which
was natural in the raster
image world and very difficult
in some cases in the vector
domain.
Nowadays, not only the satellites
but UAV's (Unmanned
Aerial Vehicles), LEO (Low
Earth Orbiting) constellations,
HALE (High Altitude Long
Endurance) vehicles and even
digital cameras are all creating
terabytes and petabytes even
zetabyes of image information.
And very soon we will not be
able to keep up with the high
quality and quantity of image
data in flow. Our business
case is thus cheaper and
faster because it is much scalable
and better because I
believe that this technology
from satellite is much richer
than vector maps. There are
many modelled and layered
information available but the
satellite image has it all in one
place - spatial features like
road and buildings, water bodies
and forests, etc., even
spectral data from
multi/hyper-spectral satellites
which are fairly temporal in
nature as well.
OGC AND
INTEROPERABILITY
We were one of the six founding
member of OGC. We could
have never achieved this limited
success unless we pushed
for OGC national standards. It
is difficult for small companies
to have and maintain different
formats. Small companies
would never be able to sell in
Canada or US or India or
Europe, unless they stick to
OGC standards in order to
make big international successes.
The company
decreases the cost of creating
the software and decreases
the barriers to penetration
internationally. Now from government's
perspective, if you
have only 2-3 monolithic companies
with closed proprietor's
standards, the cost of the systems
goes way up. And that is
why US government has mandated
on all procurements to
be OGC compliant open standards.
The idea basically is to
have a flexible, scriptable/customisable
and interoperable
platform based on a centralised
server and a data
management system with
geospatial capabilities.
We as an international organisation
need to work together
to solve issues of global
warming, climate change, terrorism
and wars that we are
causing to our own planet. All
these issues are in a way
geospatial and to deal with it
efficiently we need a system
that is interoperable. I believe
in coming 3-5 years we would
reach, if not ideal, at least a
near ideal situation in interoperability,
even in India.
CAPACITY BUILDING
No one country has enough
skilled people to keep pace
with the processing of image
information. By eliminating the
requirement for pre-processing
of the image information
using PCI software, we believe
that we are creating opportunities
for people to better
allocate time and resources
to research and fill vacancies
associated with analysis of
the giant amount of image
information that will be
available to us over the next
five years. We need to have
researchers who will help
develop algorithms for improving
the automation process
and making user-defined data
available in near real- time
basis. The researchers should
focus their learning towards
spatial analysis techniques.
We have to shift our focus to
much higher quality job which
is closer to decision making
process because in the end
this information will be made
available to the decision making
agencies and individuals
for emergency response or
anything of that nature.
PCI INDIA
We are going to start operations
in India that will provide
PCI software packages along
with solutions for Indian private
and government sectors.
We are working towards tieups
with top 5 to 10 Indian
companies that truly own the
market to provide them with
underlying image-centric technology
and allow them to
script it according to their
requirements. We are also
planning to work with some
governments like Punjab to
help them develop agricultural
information systems. It will be
hard to sell them the systems,
hence we are also thinking of
providing them with the information
and solutions.
VISION
We are witnessing image data
explosion and extracting information
would be lesser of
activity and people would be
working directly on these
imageries as we do with the
vector-centric Geomatics solutions.
There is too much image
information available and it is
going to be wasted unless we
switch our paradigm to an
image-centric paradigm. It is
our vision that PCI becomes a
‘platform image-centric technology
provider’ to all the corporations,
governments and
individuals and help them
process their image data to
extract images for further
analysis that will support the
end use.
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