Thursday, February 5, 2009

ERDAS Image Web Server Demo Site

With the days of authoring geospatial image products and then shipping them off to customers on DVDs coming to a close, I would like to highlight a demo website for the ERDAS Image Web Server. IWS is a solution for serving imagery to web clients, geospatial applications, or mobile devices. Here's what a snippet of the "Home" section of the site looks like:


The interesting parts of the demo site are in the "IWS in Action" drop down menu. The options provide examples of what is possible with IWS. Some examples include:

  • Geo-linking Images
  • Geoprocessing
  • GIS Integration
  • Image Enhancements
  • Massive Terabyte-Size Imagery
  • Real-Time Tracking
  • Reprojection
  • Time Series Data
  • World Image Gallery
  • and samples packaged with IWS
If you're been checking out the new capability for viewing historical imagery in Google Earth 5.0, then check out the "Time Series Data" example - this demonstrates how your own historical or time-series imagery could be served up. Personally I think this is a big potential growth area, as it allows viewers to quickly assess change over time in a specific area of interest. There is a massive amount of historical ortho imagery out there, so it is great to see organizations starting to put together applications for enabling visual change detection.

The World Image Gallery also has a large amount of example datasets. This is worth a look because it displays the performance of datasets of various type and size. Here's a screen shot of a San Diego area mosaic:


The Geoprocessing section shows off some interesting options as well. The example below shows the hillshading capability.

Hopefully you find the site useful, and please feel free to send us feedback or suggestions.

2 comments:

Jarlath O'Neil-Dunne said...

I really like your idea about serving up imagery for change detection. Automated feature extraction methods are very sensitive to image quality. Does the ERDAS Image Web Server allow one to clip out a section of an image and have it delivered in an uncompressed format? That would be quite a capability. The end user would get to view all of the imagery in a timely manner, but only clip out the portion they want to analyze.

Anonymous said...

Hi,

Yes - IWS does let you crop out an area and download it as TIF, JPEG, JPEG 2000 or pretty much any other format you want.

They have this working in the State of Oregon, another IWS site: http://imagery.oregonexplorer.info/dhtml