Image Exploitation for the Enterprise

Abstract

Image Exploitation for the Enterprise

Richard McKay
Senior Vice President
Global Sales
Leica Geosystems
Geospatial Imaging
USA

Increasingly, imagery is being used to drive decisions in large organizations. Maturing standards and improvements in image compression, delivery and processing power are bringing image exploitation to the enterprise. The capabilities traditionally locked in the image analysts labs are now moving to the nearest browser. With this, there is an increased need for managing the data and storage, automating information extraction and collaborating and sharing the Information.

Incorporating imagery in the enterprise allows true multi-user, simultaneous access to the same production project from any workstation in the production network and security on par with the system domain. Additionally, the enterprise includes rational schemes for managing high volume data types and interoperable and scalable services. To ensure flexibility, it is important that your system be Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) compliant. There is now OGC standardization for the Coordinate Transformation Service, providing interfaces for general positioning, coordinate systems and coordinate transformation. Additional vital standardization includes the Catalogue Service (CSW), Web Map Service (WMS), Web Coverage Service (WCS) and SensorML. The catalogue is the central mechanism for the storage and discovery of information about available data and services. The catalogue must conform to OGC Catalogue Service (CS-W), be based on a standardized data model (ISO 91130, ebRIM), crawl and harvest geospatial data stores, register and harvest services, support multiple spatial reference systems and accessing and editing of metadata and complex queries.

WMS is a simple protocol for delivering a “map” as pixels in the form of a web image (PNG, JPG) at a selected scale. WCS is a rich protocol for delivering a true image in a broad range of formats. JPIP is an evolving standard for streaming delivery of pixels as a wavelet (JPEG2000) compressed stream. ECWP is an existing protocol for delivering pixels as JPEG2000 code blocks.

Because of the sheer size of high-resolution imagery, it is important to incorporate the best compression technology into your system. Compressed imagery is easier to use and manage than uncompressed image tiles. Simply put, serving compressed imagery is faster than uncompressed images. Applying compression techniques allows you to share and use imagery throughout your business processes (desktop and server applications). Additionally, wavelet compression can provide up to a five-fold improvement without loss and up to 20 times improvement with minimal loss of data.

With a modelling service, a single author may define and provide models to solve various problems for multiple users. The users would select the model from a library and request that the modeling service apply this to the selected data to generate a result. The model is self-describing and meant to be used in conjunction with a query system to select the appropriate data. The Result of the model is returned as a separate HTML from which it could be downloaded to a local file, stored in the catalogue or Loaded into a WMS Client.

By incorporating standards-based principals to imagery and location-based information, the enterprise is fully utilized, thereby empowering decision-making processes and maximizing the potential of your business system.