Sensor Spotlight: GeoEye-1

With all the recent news about NGA certification for GeoEye-1, I thought I'd write a post on it. Aside from usage in Google Earth, there's also been recent coverage on GeoEye imagery being used in a new video game from Ubisoft. Check out the YouTube video of the game below. There's an interesting dialog about using stereo imagery for gaming as well, which makes sense considering terrain, buildings, and image texture can all be derived from the GeoEye stereo products.



As for the details, sensor specs are available on the GeoEye website here. The pan sensor has a resolution of 0.41 meters and the multispectral sensor has 1.65 meter resolution. The swath width is 15.2 kilometers and at an altitude of 681km the revisit time is less than three days. GeoEye also maintains a great looking gallery of images from the sensor here.


Back in September I discussed the launch site set-up by GeoEye for streaming video of the launch. This is now available on YouTube as well:



We added support in LPS for the GeoEye-1 rigorous and RPC sensor models back in LPS 9.2, and it is also available in the current 9.3 version. GeoEye has also recently provided us with sample data for accuracy testing and validation. Early results are looking good and I will post an update when we're a bit further along.