Wednesday, October 31, 2012

The Release of ERDAS IMAGINE 2013 is Coming Soon

The work on ERDAS IMAGINE 2013 is in the final stages. Indeed, all ERDAS Desktop products (ERDAS IMAGINE, LPS, ERDAS ER Mapper) are preparing for release. Keep an eye out for a press release from Intergraph before the end of this year (2012).

What do I like?

  • The Model Maker transition into Spatial Modeler 
    • Pull architecture for real-time processing to viewer 
    • Faster file creation 
      • Write real-time to 2D Viewer and create a file faster than Model Maker can make a file  
    • Pull architecture based on ERDAS ER Mapper concepts 
  • Python in Spatial Modeler 
    • Use custom designed applications in a Spatial Model 
    • Access other licensed software products in a Spatial Model 
  • GeoMedia vector and raster processing objects used in Spatial Modeler 
  • High performance asynchronous raster data engine 
    • Faster data access in 2D Viewer and Spatial Modeler 
    • Will be expanded in 2014 release 
  • Use of the new v5 ERDAS ECW/JP2 SDK 
    • Used in ERDAS IMAGINE, LPS and ERDAS ER Mapper 
    • Multi-threaded encoding 
    • Introduce ECW v3 file format (ECW v2 has been around since 1999)
      • ECW v3 supports up to unsigned 16-bit data 
      • ECW v3 uses GeoTIFF standard for coordinate reference system definition 
      • Expanded ECW metadata 
    • Faster encoding of ECW 
    • Faster decoding of ECW 
    • Faster ECW v2 and v3 opacity layer calculation 
    • Reduced need for J2I files with JP2 files 
    • More robust support for non-standard JP2 data 
    • More robust support for ill-defined JP2 profiles 
  • Support reading MrSID MG4 Raster  
  • Support reading of MrSID MG4 LiDAR 
  • Point cloud (LiDAR) support 
    • Viewing 
    • Automatic classification 
    • Manual classification 
    • Data preparation 
    • Support read and write of LAS 
  • New LPS user interface 
  • Improved Terrain Prep Tool 
  • Improved MosaicPro (we never stop making MosaicPro better) 
  • New swipe tools (transitions ribbon) 
  • New measurement ribbon for height from shadow and height from building lean and ortho measurements  
  • Real-time spectral indices (using Spatial Modeler technology) 
    • Vegetation 
    • Snow / Ice 
    • Minerals
    • Water 
  • New unsupervised classification tools 
  • Faster unsupervised classification tools 
  • Use of SAM and SCM in supervised classification 
  • New image segmentation algorithm in IMAGINE Objective 
  • Numerous interface improvements to make ERDAS IMAGINE and LPS more intuitive to expert and novice alike 
There is more, but these are what I really like. 

So, keep an eye out for the press releases... from Intergraph. Don't forget, ERDAS is part of Intergraph and   Intergraph is part of Hexagon. The Erdasians have helped our fellow Intergraph employees integrate well within Hexagon. 





7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Paul..I need help to get fix for memory leak from 4.2 sdk. Is this the first version out since then (from March 2011 I think). How can I find if the fix is included and will it be weeks or months? My neck is being breathed down for a fix.

Paul said...

Hello Anonymous,

We were in development of the v4.3 ECW/JP2 SDK last February. It was all but complete when we started aggressively on v5. I will look into where it is for you.

Paul

Anonymous said...

Paul,

will IMAGINE/LPS 2013 support GPU processing?

Paul said...

Use of GPU was first tested and used in ERDAS IMAGINE 2011. We found with that delivered to the customer experiment, the issue with speeding up raster processing is not processing performance of a CPU and GPU in most cases, but ability to deliver massive amounts of data to the processor. (Get data off disk very fast.)

This is why we decided to spend time in 2013 on our new 'asynchronous raster data engine' and the pull architecture in Spatial Modeler before any massive moves into GPU.

Do not get me wrong, more GPU work was done in 2013, but your speedups will come from the 'asynchronous raster data engine' and the pull architecture in Spatial Modeler, not GPU.

All that being said, where we are going with performance in the releases beyond 2013 have already been discussed, and GPU is part of that work.

Anonymous said...

Hi Paul,
Using ERDAS imagine 2012 and wondering how to run the segmentation after the edge detection has been completed? I have asked lecturers and all, they have either not heard of it or dont know how to do it?
Thanks

Paul said...

A Segmentation routine is included in IMAGINE Professional. Have you looked under Raster > Classification > Unsupervised for 'Image Segmentation." The routine includes edge detection and spectral anlaysis as part of the process.

Jarlath O'Neil-Dunne said...

Too bad the HEAK licensing changed in 2013 to prohibit the use of the software for research. In talking with my colleagues there is an almost universal reluctance to make the move to 2013 because of this.