NGA Increases Commitment to ERDAS Products with 5-Year Contract Renewal

The following news was just distributed to the press:
ERDAS is pleased to announce that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) recently signed a 5-year contract renewal with ERDAS. The contract includes support and upgrades for NGA’s existing ERDAS software holdings and preferred buying arrangements for additional products, licenses and software maintenance renewals.

With this contract, NGA has expanded its ERDAS investment by 20%, meeting an increased demand across the organization for ERDAS products and software licenses. ERDAS has been providing commercial image processing software to NGA since its inception as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. NGA has continued to increase its investment in ERDAS’ offering, with thousands of licenses for ERDAS software applications. This renewed investment signifies NGA’s continued loyalty to the ERDAS brand and products.

“ERDAS values its relationship with NGA tremendously and was pleased to offer them an agreement that will allow them to use leading geospatial software solutions at a significant savings. NGA’s renewed commitment to ERDAS software for another five years is a vote of confidence for ERDAS that we are extremely proud of,” said Joel Campbell, President, ERDAS. “This agreement also benefits the greater geospatial community, as the work we’ve done to meet the precise standards of NGA have created a more exceptional product portfolio to offer the rest of the industry.”

NGA collects and processes geospatial imagery to produce geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) products that present physical features and geographically referenced activities on the Earth. NGA’s timely, relevant and exceptionally accurate GEOINT supports improved decision-making for national security objectives and enables the United States military to remain at peak readiness to protect the nation. GEOINT from NGA also supports multiple humanitarian endeavors. In 2005, NGA provided imagery to support FEMA and other first responders after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and in 2007 it provided over 150 GEOINT products to help combat the California wildfires.

NGA currently owns licenses for most products in the ERDAS portfolio, including ERDAS IMAGINE and LPS, their add-on modules, and ERDAS APOLLO.

ERDAS IMAGINE 2011 Coming Soon

Here we are again, another year later and ERDAS is about to put out another software release. ERDAS IMAGINE 2011 will meet its scheduled release next month. At this time, I will not cover what all is in 2011, as that is for the World Tour Events and soon to be released on the erdas.com website.

Also, I have spoke with Frank Warmerdam and the integration of the v4.1 of the ERDAS ECW JPEG2000 SDK into GDAL is going very well. It should make the GDAL v1.8 release due out this year as well.

One subject I will speak of on is the ERDAS ECW JPEG2000 SDK use within ERDAS IMAGINE. ERDAS has bumped the IMAGINE Essentials input file size for ECW and JPEG2000 creation from 10Gpixels to 250Gpixels and in IMAGINE Advantage from 100Gpixels to 500Gpixels.

Transparency layers can be created with new compressions in Exporter and MosaicPro. There is a new tool to add ECW Transparency layers to existing ECW files without re-compressing the data too.

Link to ERDAS download...

ERDAS ECW JPEG2000 SDK v.4.1 (GDAL Update)

I recently got an update from the ECW team in Perth concerning the ERDAS ECW JPEG2000 SDK v4.1 support in GDAL.

ERDAS is currently compiling the ERDAS ECW JPEG2000 v4.1 SDK against GDAL 1.7.2, in both 32- and 64-bit Windows variants. It is known to compile against 1.5 as well, so using the 1.7.2 driver with 1.6 should probably work (with a bit of fidgeting around). There remain some outstanding issues to address (like opacity channel support), but once the ERDAS 2011 products are released later this quarter, ERDAS will finalize our GDAL driver and give to the work Frank Warmerdam and the GDAL team for incorporation into the main GDAL source.

Hexagon’s Ola Rollén Oct 2010 Geospatial World Interview

Selected questions and answers from Hexagon’s Ola Rollén in an Oct 2010, Geospatial World Interview

What would be different at Intergraph under your leadership?

“Hexagon will bring in more aggressive investment and re-investment to keep customer satisfaction and belief in Intergraph intact. Process, Power and Marine (PPM) business of Intergraph has grown significantly in the last few years but I do agree that GeoMedia has not advanced as much as it should have. There is definitely an opportunity for Hexagon to turn it around. It is a great product and with capital investments of Hexagon, I am quite confident of bringing it to the required levels and Erdas will provide a great support and help in this endeavour.”

Shall we presume that Erdas will get integrated with Intergraph?

“Yes, we can presume that Erdas will become a part of Intergraph as it makes more sense to be integrated with Intergraph and at the same time Zeiss/Intergraph (ZI) will become a part of Leica Geosystems. There will be an exchange of technology between the two groups.”

Acquisition of Intergraph, for sure, puts Hexagon well ahead of other geospatial companies, making it the leader of the geospatial market. Such a position also puts extraordinary pressure to not just maintain the leadership position, but also to invest in market development and provide direction to the industry. What specific plans do you have to address this situation?

“Hexagon is one of the leaders of the geospatial industry and we understand our responsibility well. In the short term, we have the obligation to provide a more competitive GeoMedia for traditional and loyal users who relied on it for decades. In the long term, I think it is even more important to provide a path to the GIS user to remain competitive against the large movements led by Google and Microsoft as they begin to encroach upon the professional GIS space. I think that's where Hexagon could provide a more stable solution to professional GIS community to further their profession.”

http://geospatialworld.net/

ECW Support in ArcGIS 10 Desktop

With the release of ArcGIS 10, ESRI’s desktop products support ECW image files natively through GDAL. The GDAL move was part of ESRI's switch from the ERDAS Raster Data Objects (RDO) that ESRI paid ERDAS to use. It was very low cost, as ESRI has historically been a business partner, but ESRI wanted to go in another direction. (The ESRI community can expect a bumpy raster ride for a few releases.)

The GDAL version used in ArcGIS 10 uses an older version of the ERDAS ECW JPEG2000 SDK (ECW SDK), so opacity is not supported and the speed is a little slower than what will be available using the latest version of the ECW SDK, v4.1.

ERDAS is working with GDAL to upgrade GDAL to the latest version of the ECW SDK, scheduled to be complete before Feb 1, 2011. Once the GDAL work is complete, software companies using GDAL (such as ESRI) need only download the Read Only ECW SDK and build in their desktop application as defined by GDAL and according to the ECW SDK EULA for free ECW, ECWP and JPEG2000 desktop read capability.

GDAL is a SDK and the ECW SDK EULA states a SDK cannot deliver the ECW SDK with their SDK. The solution is for GDAL to build against the ECW SDK, but not deliver the ECW SDK. Then the companies using GDAL can simply download the Read Only ECW SDK from ERDAS and put GDAL and the ECW SDK in their desktop software application.

The beauty of the way the Read Only and Full ECW SDKs were put together, once the developer has done the work for ECW, the work to implement ECWP and JPEG2000 may take as few as 30 more minutes’ development time.

If a company wishes their software application to write ECW and JPEG2000 data, they can use the same GDAL approach noted above; and with a purchase of the Full ECW SDK from ERDAS, they add writing ECW and JPEG2000 data.

For ECW support in ArcGIS Server see: http://field-guide.blogspot.com/2011/04/news-release-erdas-releases-new-product.html

For streaming ECW and JP2 data via ECWP in ArcGIS desktop see: http://field-guide.blogspot.com/2011/05/esri-adding-for-ecwp-in-arcgis.html


Why ECW?
Many in the geospatial community correctly think of ECW (Enhanced Compression Wavelet) as a data format that saves disk space. A more powerful aspect of ECW, because of its fundamental mathematical breakthrough enabling fast compression, the same breakthrough provides very fast decompression as well; while only using a small amount of RAM. Whether accessing ECW on a desktop, over a LAN, or over the internet, ECW is very fast. In many cases, ECW is much faster than accessing the imagery in an uncompressed format.

What is ECWP?
Geospatial images can be hundreds or thousands of gigabytes in size. Traditional mechanisms for serving image data over the internet are inadequate when high-speed performance is required. ECWP (Enhanced Compression Wavelet Protocol) leverages the benefits of a the mathematically efficient ECW format and allows the server to stream these large geospatial images to a user's application, rather than sending a regular image ver HTTP, while only using a tiny amount of RAM. JPEG2000 can be streamed with ECWP as well, with higher performance than JPIP.

Why JPEG2000?
JPEG2000 is an ISO-certified wavelet compression image format that is commonly used for geospatial imagery. The format is defined by the Joint Photographic Experts Group. Because JPEG2000 was designed by a committee to do a great many things, it will never be as fast as ECW. Because JPEG2000 compression and decompression technology is similar to ECW, it was simple to add this capability to the ERDAS ECW JPEG2000 SDK, even supporting JPEG2000 streaming within ECWP. But, because JPEG2000 was created by a committee to a great many things, JPEG2000 is unlikely to ever be as fast as ECW.

ECW on Wikipedia

ERDAS Releases New Version of ERDAS ECW JPEG2000 SDK

As many of you know, I am also the Product Manager for the ERDAS ECW JPEG2000 SDK. I am proud of the work the SDK development team in Perth has done. Components of this released version of the SDK are being used in all ERDAS 2010 v10.1 products. There is a discussion forum for the SDK on ERDAS Communities.

The following was released to the press earlier today:

Norcross, GA — ERDAS announces the release of a new version of the ERDAS ECW JPEG2000 SDK, which enables software developers to include robust support for selected wavelet compression formats and protocols in the desktop applications they create.

The ERDAS ECW JPEG2000 SDK provides read and write support for the visually-lossless ECW and numerically-lossless JPEG2000 imagery formats, and read support for the ECWP protocol. Enhanced Compression Wavelet (ECW) is a compressed format designed specifically for geospatial imagery, which can quickly compress and decompress huge images using minimal memory. Enhanced Compression Wavelet Protocol ECWP) allows streaming of ECW images, enabling rapid delivery of terabyte-sized images over the internet using inexpensive server technology. JPEG2000 is an ISO-certified compressed image format that is commonly used for geospatial imagery.

Originally used in the ER Mapper products, this SDK has been implemented in all ERDAS software. ERDAS IMAGINE, LPS and ERDAS APOLLO use the SDK to provide support for these wavelet compression and transmission technologies. For over ten years, this industry-proven SDK has produced stable, high-quality commercial applications.

“The ERDAS ECW JPEG2000 SDK allows any software developer to quickly implement industry-proven support of the ECW and JPEG2000 formats in their desktop applications, easily increasing the value and appeal of those applications to end users. On top of that, we’ve included changes in the latest release that result in remarkable performance increases, allowing your customers to decode ECW and JPEG2000 images and stream via ECWP faster than ever before,” said Mark Sheridan, Director of Engineering at ERDAS and one of the original developers of ER Mapper and ECW technology.

Developers can use the newest SDK to implement read and write support for ECW and JPEG200 images with opacity bands, allowing images to overlay other imagery cleanly without showing compression artifacts around the edges. Also, the SDK can now store compressed blocks delivered over an ECWP stream in the client cache, so previously viewed data can be opened faster. This also reduces the server’s bandwidth requirement, since less data is transferred to the client.

The C++ API provided in the SDK includes new functions for file decoding, rendering and accessing lower-level JPEG2000 features, such as the number of quality layers to include during decoding. Additionally, the API allows developers to retrieve and set options related to opacity, fussy or resilient modes in the decoder, the configuration of J2I index files, and caching parameters.

ERDAS distributes a free version of the SDK that enables read support for ECW, JPEG2000 and ECWP on its product web site.

For more information about ERDAS or its products and services, please call +1 770 776 3400, toll free +1 877 GO ERDAS, or visit www.erdas.com.

ERDAS IMAGINE 2010 Ribbon UI: Invest one week and experiment for yourself

There have been many positive comments about the ERDAS IMAGINE 2010 Ribbon user interface (UI). There are some users who have not made the transition, saying they do not want to learn a new UI. I understand the comfortable feeling we have with an old UI. I remember not liking the move from a command prompt / menu system of the ERDAS 7.x series and the pre-ArcGIS versions to the graphical user interface (GUI) of ERDAS IMAGINE in the 1990s and of ArcGIS in the 2000s. Notwithstanding humans seeking to stay within a comfort zone of what is known, if we are not learning something new every day, are we wasting the learning skills we developed in all our years in school?

Val Clarke, a wise friend of mine and Dr. John Jensen's, told me in about 1983, "There is no growth without change." I have discovered over the subsequent 27 years, he is correct.

To help with ERDAS' customers transition (or growth), ERDAS wrote a document last year to help the transition. This document is named, "Increasing Workflow Efficiency with ERDAS IMAGINE 2010" and can be found on the ERDAS IMAGINE Product page under the "Product Literature" tab (see: http://www.erdas.com/tabid/84/currentid/1050/default.aspx).

The move to the Ribbon design has allowed ERDAS to expose more of the power of ERDAS IMAGINE than ever before. We spend a lot of time on placement of functions, and continue to debate and improve each development iteration. If you have not spent one-week using the ERDAS IMAGINE 2010 Ribbon User Interface, you are missing out. Invest one-week and then tell me if the old UI is better than the new.

Don't take my word for it. Invest one week and experiment for yourself.

Hexagon participates at Intergraph 2010 event

Today Ola Rollén, President and CEO of Hexagon AB, participates at the Intergraph Corporation's annual international users' conference in Las Vegas, USA. The event "Intergraph 2010" hosts approximately 2 000 Intergraph customers from across the world and offers previews of new Intergraph technology, presentations by industry experts and hands-on training of Intergraph technology.

In a keynote address Ola Rollén comments on the planned acquisition of Intergraph announced on 7 July 2010. He reiterates Hexagon's intentions of continuous commitment and investment in Intergraph's vision, solutions, customers and employees. Ola Rollén also confirms Hexagon's intent to support Intergraph's product roadmap and to further invest in research and development.

"It is our intention that Intergraph's solutions will become Hexagon's core software platform, providing differentiated and vertically-focused software solutions. By combining Intergraph's technologies with our global resources and technologies, Hexagon will be able to create new exciting solutions to customers going forward", says Ola Rollén.

The acquisition of Intergraph is subject to completion of regulatory process and satisfaction of customary closing conditions. Competition law notifications have been submitted to the relevant regulatory authorities and the applicable waiting periods have expired. Completion of the remaining regulatory procedures is pending. Financial consolidation is estimated to take place in the fourth quarter of 2010.

At closing, Intergraph will become a fully owned subsidiary of Hexagon AB and will operate as a separate Hexagon division under the Intergraph name and branding. Following closing, it is planned that Ola Rollén will assume the role of CEO of Intergraph in accordance with the Hexagon model for successful integration into the Hexagon Group. Following closing, the two Intergraph divisions Process, Power & Marine and Security Government & Infrastructure will continue to operate under the leadership of Gerhard Sallinger and John Graham, respectively.

For further information please contact: Sara Kraft, Corporate Communications, Hexagon AB, +46 8 601 26 23, sara.kraft@hexagon.se

Hexagon AB is a global measurement technologies company with strong market positions. Hexagon's mission is to develop and market leading technologies and services to measure in one, two or three dimensions, to position and update objects and to time processes. The group has about 7 500 employees in 39 countries and net sales of about 12 000 MSEK.

Extracted 09/01/2010 http://investors.hexagon.se/index.php?p=press&afw_lang=en

See Ola's Keynote at the Intergraph User Conference

Understanding the Target Compression Ratio when using the ERDAS ECW JPEG2000 SDK

It is important to note that when using the ERDAS ECW JPEG2000 SDK, the ECW and JPEG2000 target compression ratio makes no guarantees about the actual output size that will be achieved. Images with certain features (for example, air photos showing large regions of a similar color, like background values, oceans or forests) are easier to compress than others (completely random images).

When compressing images there is a tradeoff between the degree of compression achieved and the quality of the resulting image. The highest rates of compression can only be achieved by discarding some less important data from the image, known as lossy decompression. In the ERDAS ECW JPEG2000 SDK, the target compression ratio is an abstract figure representing your choice in this tradeoff. It approximates the likely ratio of input file size to output file size, given certain parameters for compression.

It is often unwise to try and force each image into a compressed file of the same size. This is because the resulting compressed images will have widely varying quality levels which may reduce their usefulness and any subsequent processing will have decreased value when combining different image tiles of different quality compression together.

Below is a table taken from the ERDAS IMAGINE 2010 Help (to be released later in 2011). This table was created from in-house testing and customer feedback.

Imagery	Target Compression Ratio
Visually Lossless RGB Image	Crisp Image Interpretation (2x zoom)	4:1
Near Visually Lossless RGB Image	Clear Image Interpretation (2x zoom)	6:1
RGB Image	High Quality Printed Maps and typical GIS applications	15:1 to 25:1
RGB Image	Internet or Email Distribution	15:1 to 40:1
Visually Lossless Panchromatic Image	Crisp Image Interpretation (2x zoom)	2:1
Near Visually Lossless Panchromatic Image	Clear Image Interpretation (2x zoom)	3:1
Panchromatic Image	High Quality Printed Maps and typical GIS applications	10:1 to 15:1
Panchromatic Image	Internet or Email Distribution	15:1 to 30:1
Visually Lossless Multispectral Image	Crisp Image Interpretation (2x zoom)	3:1
Near Visually Lossless Multispectral Image	Clear Image Interpretation (2x zoom)	4:1
Numerically Lossless RGB, Panchromatic, and Multispectral (JPEG 2000 Only)	Imagery with perfect numeric reconstruction	1:1

Numerically Lossless or Visually Lossless Wavelet Compression

I hear so very often, we need lossless image compression (meaning numerically lossless - NL). I respect the point much more when I hear it from remote sensing and photogrammetry scientists than from GIS users.

Why my differentiation? Am I diss’ing the GIS folks? I hope not, that is not my intention.

Way back in 2001 I did a little test. I was at Georgia Tech Center for GIS (CGIS) and was asked by the State of Georgia to determine what compression level was acceptable to compress the state’s Color-Infrared aerials. Wavelet NL was not available through COTS software at the time (MrSID and ECW) and CGIS was not funded to research a new compression method. We were told to research what COTS compression level to use.

So, we pulled together engineering students, business students, architectural students, geospatial scientists, and secretaries. Most had some geospatial training and a few did not. We displayed an 8-bit uncompressed image, and compressed versions of the same image at 10:1, 15:1, 20:1, 25:1 and 30:1 compressions.

The people were allowed display images side-by-side, use swipe, blend, and fade functions. They could zoom in and out, but no further than a 4x zoom.

Only one person could see the compression artifacts at a 1:1 zoom before 20:1 compression. At 20:1 all the experienced remote sensing people could see a few artifacts. The experienced GIS people could see the artifacts at a 2x zoom of 15:1, but only one of non-geospatial people (a business student) could see the artifacts at 2x 15:1. (Later she decided to work as a research assistant for me and is still in the geospatial industry).

My point is… many in the geospatial industry push the 2 – 2.5x file size saving when using NL compression; when many trained geospatial people cannot see a compression artifacts in 3-band image compressions below 10:1 unless they zoom in to 4x. (Sure, we all know of the exceptions; the remote sensing, and photogrammetry experts duly noted above; but these are the exception, not the rule.)

So why not compress at a VL level when you are not doing precise remote sensing or photogrammetry? The medical imaging industry is gravitating on between 8:1 and12:1. Is what we are doing in the geospatial world so important we have to preserve more precision than the medical imaging? Are we protecting more precision than our accuracy supports?

I for one think we are wasting space and time when we do not compress to at least the VL compression level.

A final note, I am running tests to know at what level we can wavelet compress data and not affect autocorrelation, classification, and vegetation indices. Have any of you dared such tests? Care to let us know?

Hexagon Aquires Intergraph

Hexagon, the parent company of Leica Geosystems (the parent company of ERDAS) announced today it acquired Intergraph yesterday, July 6, 2010. With this acquisition, Hexagon owns the two most respected areal imaging / LIDAR sensor companies. This capability along with the high precision GPS, CAD, GIS and Remote Sensing software capabilities, and different market access should make for interesting synergies among Hexagon's geospatial companies over the next few years.


Hexagon Announcement

Intergraph Announcement

With this acquisition, has Ola Rollen, CEO of Hexagon positioned Hexagon as the largest geospatial organization on the planet? Looking at the Intergraph, Leica Geosystems, NovAtel and ERDAS numbers, the case can surely be proposed.

Ola has told his ERDAS and Leica Geosystems people Hexagon is dedicated to the software business. This move puts real teeth behind his comments and right in the middle of the geospatial industry.

Ola Rollen's Press Conference

Hexagon will move Intergraph's sensor unit over to Leica Geosystems and ERDAS, Inc. over to Intergraph. This will consolidate geospatial hardware under Leica Geosystems and geospatial software under Intergraph.

Stay Tuned!