eATE: Automatic Terrain Extraction Webinar

If you're interested in automatic 3D terrain generation technology, please consider participating in our "Terrain from Imagery" webinar tomorrow (11am ET). Details are on the ERDAS homepage and the registration info is here. I'll be discussing some new technology that we've been working on for some time now, and are looking forward to releasing later this year. The webinar will cover a bit of introductory material, and then move into other areas such as point cloud generation (versus TINs and Grids), RGB-encoding, achieving throughput through parallel processing, and an overview of the user interface and some of the results we've generated thus far.

GeoEye-1 Color Terrain: Hobart, Australia

3D/Stereoscopic Video Samples

I haven't thought about 3D video much before, but a newsletter sent out from Planar highlighted a nice 3D video they put together. You can find out how to view it yourself and download samples on the Planar3D blog.

One interesting thing about the Stereoscopic Player from www.3dtv.at is that you can specify and left and right video. This makes stereo display ideal for a Planar monitor, or if you have a pair of red-cyan glasses you can view them on an LCD display (e.g. a laptop display).

Downloading ASTER Data and More...

With all the recent media attention, it seems like it is best to wait a bit before trying to download any of the data. The Japanese site (ERSDAC) published a warning earlier today that downloads may timeout, and I had a challenging time even getting the USGS site to load:

I have mentioned this before, but here is a paper on hydrology/glacier mapping in the Tien Shan mountain range using both ASTER and SRTM elevation data. One of the benefits of ASTER and other satellite sensors is that they are very applicable to remote area mapping operations.

So while you're waiting for ASTER traffic to subside, why not check out the ASTER User Handbook? It contains a wealth of background information on the sensor, data products, processing, applications, and FAQs. Here it is:

USGS: aster user guide v2