Image analysis is a key geospatial application for working with and exploiting multispectral, remotely-sensed imagery and orthophotography. These applications enable georeferencing, visualization, modeling, derivation, and extraction of useful information from image sensor platforms used in photogrammetry, Earth observation, weather satellite collection, ocean, and atmospheric observing platforms.
Examples of common image analysis applications include:
- Multispectral classification of remotely sensed imagery to assign land cover values to various patches on the surface of the earth – for example classifying the land cover as forest, grass, bare ground, water, pavement, built areas, and so on.
- Automated and supervised feature extraction of feature shapes and boundaries from image data sources.
- Capture of photogrammetric features in 3D using stereo pairs.
A key ESRI partner, ITT VIS provides the highly regarded ENVI software product, which extends the core capabilities of ArcGIS for image analysis. ENVI includes tools for image processing workflows and tasks such as image classification, feature extraction, and other multispectral image operations.