ITRES Uses ENVI For Their Environmental Customers
Anonym
Customer Challenge
Environmental companies in industries such as forestry, agriculture, water quality mapping, military ordinance detection, and emergency response need complete data analysis solutions. ITRES needed to create a solution for their customers that would employ hyperspectral imagery to analyze environmental issues, including forest silviculture and aquatic characteristics.
Solution Achieved
ITRES Research Limited of Alberta, Canada builds and supports state-of-the-art airborne hyperspectral imaging systems for studying the environment. They provide complete data analysis solutions to industries like forestry, agriculture, water quality mapping, military ordinance detection and emergency response. The data collection tool central to the imaging systems is CASI (Compact Airborne Spectral Imager), the ITRES-developed, push-broom remote sensing device. ITRES' remote sensing systems allow researchers to collect data in a cost-effective, programmable manner. When ITRES' customers need to learn all they can from their hyperspectral data, ITRES suggests incorporating ENVI® as the software for remote sensing data analysis.
"The ease of use, ability to handle CASI hyperspectral data, powerful algorithms and flexible parameters make ENVI an excellent choice for hyperspectral analysis," says Steve Mah, vice president of commercial applications at ITRES. In the data analysis process, factors such as the sensor and attitude alignments, accuracies of the attitude measurement system, GPS (Global Positioning System), ground control points and the digital elevation model all need to be taken into consideration. This ancillary data, in combination with the hyperspectral data (in the 400 nm to 1000 nm band range, depending on the application requirements), adds up to more than two gigabytes of data amassed during each operational remote sensing flight. In addition, multiple flights are routinely required to scan the entire area under study, further compounding the volume of data until complete images, sometimes as large as 50 gigabytes, are created. ENVI software provides all the tools and data handling capabilities researchers need to determine the accuracy of the data and assess forest silviculture and aquatic characteristics.
"Users usually rely on ENVI's spectral analysis tools, for example the spectral angle mapper and unmixing algorithms, to examine the data that's important to their research," says Mah. ENVI also includes an extensive spectral library, as well as masking and classification routines which complement ENVI's many other image processing and data analysis routines. "Additional forest analysis algorithms are developed using IDL and incorporated with ENVI," says Mah, referring to how ITRES has extended ENVI to meet some of their client's needs.
Key Benefits
- With ENVI, they can provide their customers with a complete, integrated solution to analyzing their hyperspectral data of forest silviculture and aquatic characteristics.
- ENVI's ease of use, ability to handle CASI hyperspectral data, powerful algorithms and flexible parameters has provided them with a cohesive and easily integrated solution.
- ENVI can handle large datasets easily with built-in, powerful routines.