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Posted by Matteo Luccio on March 1, 2013 in Features, Spring 2013

T he Sciences, Technologies, and practices of remote sensing and of geographic
information systems (GIS) arose separately, developed in parallel, intersected, and are now
inextricably linked. Nearly all the features in most GIS are collected by means of satellite
imagery or aerial photogrammetry, and GIS is the application where this imagery is most
commonly visualized. “All the foundation elements of GIS come from remote sensing:
roads, buildings, water and cultural features, topography, terrain, soils, slopes, geology, and
many more,” points out Lawrie Jordan, Director of Imagery at Esri.

Editor's Note:

This article was previously published in our partner publication, Sensors & Systems here.

Merging Two Approaches

It was not always this way. In the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, remote sensing and image
processing, on the one hand, and GIS on the other, were separate worlds—each with its
own culture and software. The former stored data in a raster format and used multispectral
classification; the latter stored data in a vector format and used topology. Software vendors
specialized in one or the other—even though their customers were acquiring and using both
types of data. Until recently, in a GIS context, imagery was thought of only as a
background or a basemap to the information that was being analyzed.
Mladen Stojic
INTERGRAPH

Over the last decade, however, remote sensing and GIS have become increasingly
integrated. “Now people are seeing imagery as a source of a lot of GIS information,” says
Jennifer Stefanacci, Director of Product Management at Exelis. “So, the analysis workflows
that our users are doing incorporate both analysis of the imagery and analysis of their GIS
data.” While GIS gives you the information about ‘where,’ through information extraction
routines, remote sensing gives you the information about ‘what,’ explains Mladen Stojic,
V.P. of Geospatial at Intergraph, “By merging the two, we now have the opportunity to do
modeling with raster data, vector data, and, on top of that, terrain data.”

Today, GIS is the most practical and efficient platform to combine remote sensing with
other layers of information. “People do not acquire and process imagery just to make a
pretty picture out of it,” says Jordan. “They want to combine it with other spatial
information to solve problems and create meaningful results.”

Workflows
In the traditional linear image processing workflow, which has been standard for more than
30 years, a technician classifies, rectifies, and mosaics each image, creating many
intermediate files. This process is very labor-intensive and requires a lot of storage space.
By contrast, the new technology processes the imagery within the framework of a GIS in
near real-time on demand, Jordan points out. “The architecture for doing this uses a very
intelligent geodatabase structure called a mosaic dataset, so you can define the process
chain of what happens to the image dynamically, and pull the image through it. You can do
orthorectification, color balancing, pan-sharpening, and mosaicing, on datasets of virtually
unlimited sizes, all dynamically, on the fly. This is truly a game changer.”
Exelis has been working with Esri for about four years on developing workflows that allow
users to use the two companies’ products in a combined fashion. “We realize that users
have access to a variety of data and the better they can leverage all of their data, the better
decisions they can make,” says Stefanacci. “So, we’ve built workflows that allow users to
move smoothly between ENVI and ArcGIS and make it easy to do their analyses without
having to think about using many different software products.”

For example, to find out the area of rooftops in a subdivision, a land assessor can use Fx
from the ENVI Toolbox in ArcMap to identify the rooftops in his image, then output to a
shapefile and use ArcMap spatial analysis tools to analyze which rooftop areas have
changed since the last assessment. In another scenario, a city planner asks his GIS specialist
which parks in their city have been added in the last four years. Unfortunately, the records
have not been kept and this information is not readily available; however, the city does
have imagery available. Since the timeframe is too short for the GIS specialist to visit each
park to update her maps, she uses imagery to identify all of the park land. She performs a
“clas- sification without training data” from the ENVI toolbox on the earlier image and a
current one, and then runs a change detection to determine which of the park areas have
changed. Finally, she uses this data to update the city’s GIS database.

The point of convergence has been the modernization of the map. That’s not because of
Esri or Intergraph, but because companies like Google and Microsoft have introduced a
new philosophy about the map and the layers of information inside it.

– Mladen Stojic, Intergraph

LiDAR data files present special challenges because they are huge. To use them in Esri
products, users must first chop them up, says Stojic. “So, it’s hard for people to find and
effectively manage the raw data, which is most valuable.” Intergraph’s 2013 release, he
says, solves that problem in three ways. First, it enables users who cannot afford a LiDAR
sensor to create very accurate and dense point cloud datasets from stereo imagery. Second,
it enables them to harvest the metadata and then use it to catalog, manage, find, and
download the data they need. Third, it allows them to natively support the data from a
visualization and an exploita- tion perspective, “meaning that you can take an LAS file and
not have to convert it into a different dataset and create redundant data on disk, in order to
use it.” See FIGURE 1.
FIGURE 1.
Classified LiDAR dataset of a powerline corridor with the ground class turned off, used to
measure encroaching vegetation. The planimetric view and three profile views are visible.
Image courtesy of Intergraph.

Integration
The variety and amount of remotely sensed data available to users has increased
dramatically in recent years—and will continue to increase, as LiDAR sensors come down
in price, new satellites are launched, and UAVs become ubiquitous. Organizations often
have LiDAR, SAR, multispectral, hyper- spectral, and panchromatic data—each of which
has its unique benefits—and can now analyze them using a single package and integrate
them seamlessly into GIS. According to Jordan, imagery is fully integrated throughout all
the ArcGIS products—desktop, server, mobile, and in the cloud—and they are very rapidly
improving their capability to support imagery. See FIGURES 2-4.
FIGURE 2.
Analyzing airborne LiDAR to identify work order areas for inspection along utility
corridors. Image courtesy of Esri.
FIGURE 3.
Using image analysis algorithms to analyze and map wetness and vegetation vigor in
imagery. Image courtesy of Esri.
FIGURE 4.
Measuring the height of features in satellite imagery. Image courtesy of Esri.

“By bringing together Intergraph and Leica Geosystems, Hexagon has specifically targeted
the integration of surveying, photogrammetry, cartography, GIS, and remote sensing, so
that the ‘Smart Map,’ as we like to call it, really becomes the point of convergence,” says
Stojic. “We hope to break down the historical silos that have been built up because of
proprietary, closed systems.” Intergraph’s 2013 release, he claims, fulfills this “dream and
vision.” See FIGURES 5-7.
FIGURE 5.
The 2013 release of ERDAS IMAGINE provides greater raster and vector integration.
Image courtesy of Intergraph.
FIGURE 6.
In conjunction with the Geospatial Portal, ERDAS APOLLO offers on-the-fly geo
processing that enables users to execute spatial models from a Web client. Image courtesy
of Intergraph.
FIGURE 7.
The LPS ribbon interface provides access to remote sensing functionality. Image courtesy
of Intergraph.

The Cloud
In geospatial technologies, as in many other fields, the trend is to move beyond traditional
file-based architectures toward cloud-based services. At the same time, there is increasingly
a need for easy access to large volumes of imagery and analysis tools. “This has resulted in
demand for online dynamic services rather than just static capabilities,” says Jordan. “These
are being offered as cloud-based services through a new business model which is based on
subscriptions and credits. The latest version of ArcGIS Online contains a significant
amount of global high-resolution imagery and this will soon be accompanied by a new
series of premium services.” The move toward cloudbased solutions will also further
accelerate the fusion of geospatial technologies and data layers.
3D

Jennifer Stefanacci
EXELIS

Ten years ago, few soft- ware programs were capable of generating 3D visualizations.
Now, thanks in part to Google Earth and Bing Maps, 3D has become commoditized and
expected. “We introduced our first 3D product in 1996,” Stojic recalls. “Since then,
graphics cards have become more powerful and more 3D-aware and their price point has
dramatically decreased, driving up adoption. You now have a culture that is 3D-aware.
Most people won’t even look at your product if you don’t do 3D right out of the box.”

To enhance its 3D capabilities, Esri recently acquired Procedural, the maker of a product
called CityEngine, designed to create 3D cities. “The future trend for feature extraction is
really about extracting 3D environments,” says Jordan. “Esri recently acquired a very large
collection of current, high-resolution DigitalGlobe imagery for the entire planet and I
believe that’s going to drive a lot of these new 3D visualizations.” While Esri is working on
visualizing 3D point clouds, Exelis’ tools focus on extracting information out of the point
cloud and turning it into data that users can incorporate into their GIS databases, says
Stefanacci.

Automated Feature Extraction

The Holy Grail at the intersection of remote sensing and GIS is rapid, efficient, and
accurate auto-mated feature extraction. It is an iterative process in which a specialist
repeatedly tweaks different para- meters to create templates, which are then used by others
to update or extract features. In its 2013 release, Intergraph has introduced a new modeling
environment that expedites this process, says Stojic. “You will start to see more of our
feature extraction and change detection tools migrate over into this dynamic modeling
environment so that we shorten that lifecycle and streamline the process required to get the
best information layer out of this automated change detection technology.”

Exelis also has a strong tradition in this area. Its ENVI LiDAR product has automated
methods to extract buildings, trees, powerlines, and power poles directly from the 3D point
cloud, says Stefanacci. “We are looking at adding additional feature types in our upcoming
releases.” See FIGURE 8.

FIGURE 8.
The ENVI Feature Extraction Module (ENVI Fx) provides tools to read, explore, prepare,
analyze, and share information extracted from all types of imagery, such as the rooftops in
this image. Image courtesy of Exelis.
UAVS and Microsatellites

Lawrie Jordon
ESRI

The amount of data collected by UAVs and microsatellites is about to explode. “It’s the
digital fire hose in the sky and the best thing that’s ever happened for remote sensing,” says
Jordan. “Clients around the world, such as major oil companies and defense and
intelligence organizations, are using ArcGIS to handle tens of millions of high resolution
images dynamically. ArcGIS is highly scalable and was designed that way from the
beginning in anticipation of this essentially global, persistent surveillance. I believe that,
very soon, we are going to be mapping, measuring, and monitoring every square meter of
the surface of the Earth in near real-time. There will be several hundred orbiting, on-station
imaging satellites.”

Hexagon is also playing in that space. For example, two years ago it released software to
extract features from motion video. “We are looking at geo-referencing software and the
development of the aerial triangulation required to stitch together multiple frames over time
in order to get a highly accurate data product out of that data source,” says Stojic.

The Map of the future

What brought remote sensing and GIS together? “The point of convergence,” says Stojic,
“has been the modernization of the map—by which I mean Google Maps, Bing Maps,
location-aware maps. That’s where we’ve seen the two philosophies come together to form
one approach to mapping. That’s not because of Esri or Intergraph, but because companies
like Google and Microsoft have introduced a new philosophy about the map and the layers
of information inside it. Other professional vendors are continuing to support that fusion
through the synthesis of raster, vector, and point cloud data in modeling applications, in
workflows, and so forth.”

The map of the future is not really a map at all, but rather an
intelligent 3D image… What I see happening is something I like to
think of as the ‘Living Planet’—global persistent surveillance,
where all of these sources are made available dynamically. GIS is
the ideal environment to bring all this together. It’s the most exciting
time in the more than 40 years that I’ve been involved with this.

– Lawrie Jordan, Esri

How are these developments in remote sensing and GIS going to affect the end product for
most consumers of geospatial information—the map? “The map of the future is not really a
map at all, but rather an intelligent 3D image,” says Jordan. “It is going to be photo-
realistic, and you will be able to fly through it, navigate, interrogate, analyze, visualize, and
then collaborate and share it with others. It will all be cloud-based and imagery is going to
drive that. What I see happening is something I like to think of as the ‘Living Planet’—
global persistent surveillance, where all of these sources are made available dynamically.
GIS is the ideal environment to bring all this together. It’s the most exciting time in the
more than 40 years that I’ve been involved with this.” The integration of remotely sensed
data and GIS is at the center of a larger trend toward the fusion of different kinds of
geospatial data and technologies that also includes video, sensor networks, and GPS- based
tracking of mobile assets. At each step in this integration, the new capabilities progress
rapidly from advanced to standard features. For scientific, governmental, commercial, and
consumer applications, the line between reality and virtual reality is blurring, which is very
exciting indeed.