This release includes the following new and improved features.

Highlights

Supported Data Types

Support for the following data format has been added in this release:

  • AVIRIS-5 HDF products
  • Sentinel-5P (Precursor) atmospheric data products

Data Manager Enhancements

Enhancements to the Data Manager include the following changes to the display:

  • When files are added to the Data Manager, the left panel shows the files in a Tree View and the right panel shows metadata for the selected file. The file information is in HTML format, making it easy to copy and paste the information into email or other types of documents. If a raster, vector, or annotation file contains map information, the right panel also displays a world map with a red location marker to show where the data was collected. You can click on the marker to open a Reference Map Link (Powered by ESRI®) and zoom to the location.

  • You can select the Thumbnails tab in the Data Manager to switch from Tree View of all open files to a Thumbnail View.

Additional enhancements include the following:

For complete details, see the Data Manager topic.

Browse and Open Rasters Using the ENVI Catalog

The new ENVI Catalog helps you organize raster files that may be stored across different directories. Instead of manually browsing folders to find and open rasters, use ENVI Catalog to search for files by filename, sensor, location, and other metadata, then open rasters directly from the catalog into the view.

From the Dashboard options, you select how to view the catalog contents. For example:

  • In a sortable table view:

  • In a thumbnail gallery:

  • In an interactive map, where the map markers are footprints that correspond to the raster locations:

The Internal Catalog is a persistent archive that remembers every raster dataset you open in ENVI. You can also create other catalogs to organize rasters into separate collections. The fastest way to populate a catalog is to run a scan job that searches multiple folders for raster files and adds them to the catalog automatically. Scanning can run in the background, allowing you to continue working, or even leave it running overnight. You can also use the new ENVI Task Scheduler to regularly check for and add new files to your catalogs.

The Internal Catalog and the ability to browse it is included with the ENVI installation for collections of up to 250 images. The ability to create custom catalogs, scan directories and populate catalogs, and merge and prune catalogs requires a separate ENVI Catalog license; contact your sales representative for more information.

See the topics ENVI Catalog and ENVI Catalog Background and Troubleshooting for full details on how to create, use, and maintain catalogs.

For information on the tasks and methods added to this release for ENVI Catalog, see New and Updated ENVI Tasks and Routines.

Start an ENVI Server Without GSF

As of this release, ENVI Server no longer needs a GSF installation. ENVI Server runs ENVI tasks in the background, in parallel, and across multiple machines. It lets you offload heavy processing from your workstation and speed up imagery analysis by distributing jobs. It uses a queue and a configurable number of workers to control how many jobs run concurrently.

For details, see ENVI Servers.

Desktop Automation Using the Task Scheduler

ENVI now lets you create automated workflows that run in the background on a schedule. Using the operating system’s scheduling framework, you can create workflows in the ENVI Modeler or with the API that perform repetitive jobs and processes. The process can run in the background or overnight - without needing ENVI to be running - saving time and machine resources during your workday.

The Task Scheduler is ideal for models that rely on input from folders where the contents will change over time, such as creating thumbnails of new imagery that is added to a certain folder weekly.

Tasks can be scheduled to run as follows:

  • As one-time execution on a specific date/time
  • Every n minutes
  • Every n hours
  • Once per day or every n days
  • Every n weeks
  • Every n months

For more details, see Run Models on a Schedule.

Interactive Viewshed Tool Enhancements

ENVI's interactive viewshed analysis has been updated with the following:

  • The controls for the Viewshed Tool are accessible from a dialog box.

  • You can now perform reverse viewshed analysis. In the images below, the green pixels in the first image show the viewshed (the areas visible from the observer point) and the blue pixels in the second image show the reverse viewshed (the areas the observer point is visible from).

  • You can save a viewshed animation to GIF format as well as MPEG.
  • You can save viewshed locations to a JSON format and restore them.

For details on how to use the Viewshed Tool, see Interactive Viewshed Analysis and the Interactive Viewshed Analysis Tutorial.

Feature Counting Updates

New features have been added to the Feature Counting tool. You can now do the following:

  • Specify the grid size and specify a grid subset to count within:

  • Filter the feature points shown in the view:

For details, see the Feature Counting Tool topic.

Drop Location Pins

If a layer contains standard, Pseudo, RPC, or GLT map information, you can now drop location pins on the view.

You can drop a location pin in two ways:

  • From the view: Right-click on a location to drop a pin.

  • From the Cursor Value tool: Use the new Drop a pin at the current location button in the toolbar.

Pins are added to a separate layer that can be saved to and restored from a .json file. For details, see Drop a Location Pin.

Subset Grid Line Overlays

You can now specify a spatial subset on which to overlay grid lines on View. If you use a subset and then add additional files into the View, the grid lines will remain on the specified spatial subset and will not change.

See Overlay Grid Lines for details.

Publish Custom PowerPoint Templates to the ENVI Repository

You can share custom Chip View to PowerPoint templates and template configurations with other ENVI users by publishing them to the ENVI Repository. See Publish Custom Templates to an ENVI Repository and Download Custom Templates from an ENVI Repository for details.

Save Vectors to FileGDB Format

A File > Save As > Save Vector As FileGDB option has been added. This option enables you to save a vector dataset to Esri's File Geodatabase format.

Added Normalized Difference Red Index Support

The NDRE index has been added to the list of spectral indices supported by ENVI. See Normalized Difference Red Index Support (NDRE) for details.

Updated ENVI Toolbox Tools

Updated tools:

New and Updated ENVI Tasks and Routines

New tasks:

  • The following tasks were added for the new ENVI Catalog:
    • ExportCatalogToKML: Exports an ENVI Catalog as a Keyhole Markup Language (KML) file.
    • ExportCatalogToSTAC: Exports an ENVI Catalog as a SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC).
    • MergeCatalogs: Merges two or more ENVI catalog databases into a single output catalog.
    • PopulateCatalog: Populates an ENVI Catalog with a selected raster image from a database of scanned files found using the ScanFilesForCatalog task.
    • PruneCatalog: Removes catalog entries whose corresponding files are no longer present on disk.
    • QueryCatalog: Queries the ENVI catalog and returns matching rasters.
    • ScanFilesForCatalog: Scans a folder on disk to find files that can be used to populate a catalog of rasters using the PopulateCatalog task.
    • StartENVICatalogServer: Starts the ENVI Catalog Server that will be used to scan directories for rasters and populate them to ENVI Catalog.
  • ExportVectorToFileGDB: Exports a vector dataset to Esri's File Geodatabase (FileGDB) format.
  • FindFiles: Searches and returns files in a given directory based on a match pattern.
  • StartENVIServer: Starts an ENVI Server that will be used to run ENVI tasks in the background, in parallel, and across multiple machines.
  • SubmitScheduledJob: Schedules and submits a job to run and ENVI Model automatically, regardless of whether ENVI is open.

Updated tasks:

New routines:

  • ENVIDataContainer::AddToArray: Insets data objects (such as rasters, vectors, or strings) into a data container array. If the specified container already exists, the new objects will be appended to the existing ones rather than replacing them.
  • ENVICatalog: The ENVICatalog API methods have been added to access and manipulate an ENVI Catalog.
  • ENVIUI::DisplayText: Displays text in a resizable dialog window.

New ENVI Preferences

  • Classification First Class Off is a new Display General preference that determines whether to display the first class of a classification image (typically named Background or Unclassified) in the view.
  • In the Data Manager preferences, Enable Internal Catalog preference has been added to support the new ENVI Catalog.
  • Annotations > Pins preferences have been added to support the new Drop a Location Pin feature.
  • A new Pyramids parameter, Delete Auxiliary Pyramids on Exit, has been added.

See Also

See What's New (Previous ENVI Releases) for an archive of What's New information.