ENVI Services Engine: Earth and Planetary Image Processing for the Cloud

Amanda O'Connor Exelis Visual Information Solutions

The geospatial imagery analysis and exploitation community has a growing need for online analytic capabilities. Work previously done on desktop workstations must migrate to a web-accessible environment to mitigate growing data volumetrics, bandwidth usage, and end user requirements. Web based applications (or 'apps') are intended to apply analytic methods, procedures, and routines to image datasets stored within centralized server repositories.

Exelis Visual information Solutions developed an enterprise-enabled processing engine that provides remote users access to the power of ENVI image analysis and IDL applications from a web or mobile client interface. The working name for this capability is the ENVI and IDL Services Engine (ESE). This engine now enables the remote user to gain access to the same compiled ENVI and IDL functions and procedures that remote sensing scientists have utilized for decades at the desktop level.

ESE operates in a RESTful state, listening for http calls to arrive that initiate a data processing operation once those messages are registered. ESE is middleware agnostic, meaning users can implement this capability using their current enterprise architecture such as ArcGIS Server or GeoServer. Flexibility and openness in middleware components is achieved through the use of OGC standards for message and data transfer. ESE represents bringing long term earth science monitoring analysis capabilities to the cloud, harnessing existing ENVI and IDL tools and deploying them to the enterprise, and improving access to earth and planetary science data.

Poster presented at 2012 AGU Fall Meeting