Cataloguing Large Amounts of Satellite Imagery

Eduardo Iturrate Exelis Visual Information Solutions

Remote sensing users face the challenge of managing hundreds, even thousands of scenes. These images are normally stored as files organized in a folder structure. Unless there are clearly defined rules about the organization of the directories and file naming conventions, users inevitably find it very difficult to find particular images.

“Katalog” is a free satellite image cataloguing tool developed to solve this problem. It can crawl a particular folder structure in search of the satellite images, extracting both metadata, footprints, and thumbnails. This information is then searchable by a number of variables (e.g. name, sensor, geographic location, date, description, and so on) allowing users to quickly find scenes in their imagery libraries, discovering and rediscovering data they didn’t even know they had.

“Katalog” works as an extension to the ENVI image analysis software package, taking advantage of the large collection of satellite image readers that ENVI provides. Generated thumbnails and footprints are also compatible with other applications like Google Earth, Picasa, and Esri’s ArcGIS.

Poster presented at 2012 AGU Fall Meeting