New app gives field crews a fast, easy way to record information while mobile
Esri has released ArcGIS QuickCapture, a mobile app designed for rapid and at-speed field data-collection workflows.
Data can be collected from a moving vehicle with the touch of a button and sent back to the office for real-time analysis, leading to faster and more effective decision-making. The new app is designed for road inspections, aerial surveys, monitoring vegetation encroachment and more.
ArcGIS QuickCapture allows users to configure a customized interface that suits their specific project requirements, eliminating unnecessary features and options. This personalization helps users take advantage of the single-tap, big-button system to capture details and photos as they go. The app is intuitive and user-friendly, eliminating the need for extensive crew training.
The new app integrates with the user’s existing IT infrastructure and ArcGIS platform, which simplifies implementation. It uses the existing GPS and camera on smartphones and tablets, and it is compatible with iOS, Android and Windows devices.
For high-accuracy data collection workflows, QuickCapture is also compatible with external GNSS receivers.
“ArcGIS QuickCapture builds upon and enhances our existing field data collection offerings in ArcGIS,” said Ismael Chivite, senior product manager at Esri. “Field crews are demanding user experiences that are tailored to the way they work. QuickCapture is designed to capture GIS data with the tap of a button, while on the go. At-speed road asset inventories and quick damage assessments are examples of workflows where QuickCapture excels.”
Esri is partnering with the Jane Goodall Institute to develop a set of tools that will help communities map and manage the ecosystems around them through a collaborative design and planning approach, aided by GIS software.
According to the partners, these tools will help communities map, monitor, and better manage their natural resources from community forests and wildlife reserves, to water catchment and flood control areas, as well as human settlement, agriculture and agroforestry spaces.
The Jane Goodall Institute’s community-centered conservation approach — Tacare — partners local communities and governments to create sustainable livelihoods while planning for and advancing environmental protection. The Tacare approach also achieves conservation results and addresses environmental threats — including incompatible expansion of agriculture, human settlements, harvesting forest products, disease, wildlife trafficking and illegal bushmeat trade — by consulting communities about their needs and priorities, and working together to collaboratively plan for and implement land use practices that enable their own development.
“A key component of our success is that we work to help villagers find ways to make livelihoods that do not destroy the environment, and help them understand that protecting the environment not only conserves wildlife, but their own future,” said Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and United Nations Messenger of Peace.
The Jane Goodall Institute uses Esri’s ArcGIS platform and Survey123 mobile app to help communities and governments in western Tanzania, Uganda and other countries in Africa to plan, monitor and protect chimpanzee populations in local protected forests outside designated national parks.
“Conservation at the community level is essential to sustaining our natural world,” said Jack Dangermond, Esri founder and president. “Protecting global ecosystems cannot work on a global scale unless it starts locally, which is why we are honored to work with our friend and partner, the Jane Goodall Institute, on this collaboration, leveraging their years of experience working at the local scale in pursuit of conservation, balanced with the needs of human communities.”
A major use of remote sensing data is to compare images of an area taken at different times and identify the changes it underwent. With a wealth of long-term satellite imagery in open use, detecting such changes manually would be time-consuming and most likely inaccurate.
To address this, EOS Data Analytics has introduced an automated Change Detection tool to its flagship product LandViewer, a cloud tool for satellite imagery search and analysis in today’s market.
Unlike the methods involving neural networks that identify changes in the previously extracted features, the change detection algorithm implemented by EOS is using a pixel-based strategy, meaning that changes between two raster multi-band images are mathematically calculated by subtracting the pixel values for one date from the pixel values of the same coordinates for another date.
This new signature feature is designed to automate a change detection task and deliver accurate results in fewer steps and in a fraction of the time needed for change detection in most image-processing software.
Change detection interface: Images of Beirut city coastline selected for tracing the developments of the past years. (Image: LandViewer)Change detection interface: Images of Beirut city coastline selected for tracing the developments of the past years. (Image: LandViewer)
Applications from farming to environmental monitoring
One of the main goals set by EOS team was to make the complex process of change detection in remote sensing data equally accessible and easy for non-expert users coming from non-GIS industries.
With Land Viewer’s change detection tool, farmers can quickly identify the areas on their fields that were damaged by hail, storm or flooding. In forest management, satellite image detection of changes will come in handy for estimation of the burned areas following the wildfire and spotting the illegal logging or encroachment on forest lands.
Observing the rate and extent of climate changes occurring to the planet (such as polar ice melt, air and water pollution, natural habitat loss due to urban expansion) is an ongoing task of environmental scientists, who may now have it done online in a matter of minutes. By studying the differences between the past and present using the change detection tool and years of satellite data in Land Viewer, all these industries can also forecast future changes.
Top change detection use cases: Flood damage and deforestation
A picture is worth a thousand words, and the capabilities of satellite image change detection in Land Viewer can be best demonstrated on real-life examples.
Forests that still cover around a third of the world’s area are disappearing at an alarming rate, mostly due to human activities such as farming, mining, grazing of livestock, logging, and also the natural factors like wildfires. Instead of massive ground surveying of thousands of forest acres, a forestry technician can regularly monitor the forest safety with a pair of satellite images and the automated change detection based on NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index).
How does it work? NDVI is a known means of determining vegetation health. By comparing the satellite image of the intact forest with the recent one acquired after the trees were cut down, Land Viewer will detect the changes and generate a difference image highlighting the deforestation spots, which can further be downloaded by users in JPG, PNG or TIFF format. The surviving forest cover will have positive values, while the cleared areas will have negative ones and be shown in red hues indicating there’s no vegetation present.
A difference image showing the extent of deforestation in Madagascar between 2016 and 2018; generated from two Sentinel-2 satellite images. (Image: LandViewer)
Another widespread use case for change detection would be agricultural flood damage assessment, which is of most interest to crop growers and insurance companies. Whenever flooding has taken a heavy toll on your harvest, the damage can be quickly mapped and measured with the help of NDWI-based change detection algorithms.
Results of Sentinel-2 scene change detection: The red and orange areas represent the flooded part of the field,; the surrounding fields are green, meaning they avoided the damage. California flooding, February 2017. (Image: LandViewer)
How to run change detection in Land Viewer
There are two ways you can launch the tool and start finding differences on multi-temporal satellite images: by clicking the right menu icon “Analysis tools” or from the Comparison slider ‒ whichever is more convenient. Currently, change detection is performed on optical (passive) satellite data only; addition of the algorithms for active remote sensing data is scheduled for future updates.
Maptitude for Redistricting is designed specifically for anyone involved in or preparing for the 2020 redistricting cycle, from novice to professional users.
Maptitude for Redistricting 2019 has new partisan competitiveness reports, adds access to imagery layers, and allows users to save and share their plans in a variety of formats.
New features include:
Speed improvements provide faster access to maps and geographic analysis.
Expanded file support for Excel worksheets, Google Earth Documents (KML/KMZ) attribute data fields, and MapPoint files.
New partisan competitiveness reports and measures of compactness for analyzing redistricting plans,
Integrated satellite imagery from a variety of sources for giving a better view of district composition.
The latest Census geography and data, including current ACS data.
Maptitude for Redistricting is a professional tool for political redistricting. It provides measures and reports that support the creation of fair and balanced districts.
Maptitude is constantly enhanced and provides tools such as the Efficiency Gap Measure for exploring redistricting problems.
Maptitude was used to democratize redistricting in California and is used by the majority of redistricters, from independent commissions, non-profits, and civil rights groups, to the courts and political parties.
Blue Marble Geographics has released a new version of the Global Mapper software development kit (SDK), providing software engineers with the means to embed the latest geospatial technology into their custom applications.
Blue Marble’s GIS software has been used by GIS professionals for 25 years. Users come from all industries including software, oil and gas, mining, civil engineering, surveying and technology companies, as well as government departments and academic institutions.
Global Mapper’s GIS application is capable of displaying, converting and analyzing virtually any type of geospatial data. The Global Mapper SDK and accompanying Lidar Module SDK provide software developers with a toolkit for accessing much of this functionality from within an existing or custom-built application.
The SDK also enables the creation of custom toolbars and extensions to enhance the data processing and analysis functionality of the standard version of Global Mapper. This capability allows in-house developers to create a unique version of the application to meet their specific needs or for software companies to build custom products for commercial distribution.
Highlights of the latest version of the SDK include:
A new function to allow querying of elevation from a specific list of elevation layers
Significant speed improvements when working with vector data with attributes
Faster viewshed calculation on computers with multiple cores
Support for downloading vector features from Esri RESTful data sources
S-52 point symbols for S-57 and S-63 marine chart files
Updated SHIFT_LAYER script command to support shifting in the Z (elevation) direction.
Support for several new formats including, OpenFlight and HEC-RAS raster and vector files
The supplementary Lidar Module SDK now offers:
The ability to select points based on their proximity to other lidar points and/or line features
A new option to update the return number/count when deleting multi-return points
“Global Mapper’s reputation as a powerful geospatial data processing and analysis application is well known throughout the world and software engineers are increasingly integrating these tools into a wide variety of development projects,” said Patrick Cunningham, Blue Marble president. “The Global Mapper SDK is unrivaled in its ease of deployment, data format support, affordability, and in its adaptability, allowing it to meet the ever-changing needs of today’s geospatial software development sector.”
Household size distributions are critical inputs to many business analyses, but may not be correctly derived from U.S. Census data, according to Caliper.
The Census counts people at their geographic locations, and when several unrelated people live at the same address, they are reported as one household with a number of residents.
A confusing array of data is reported. In both the Census SF1 2010 file and in 2017 ACS, the following tabulations are provided down to the Census tract level:
People in Family Households
2 person Family Households
3 person Family Households
4 person Family Households
5 person Family Households
6 person Family Households
7+ person Family Households
Non-relatives in Family Households
Unmarried Partners (including same-sex couples) in Family Households
People in Non-Family Households
Unmarried Partners (including same-sex couples) in Non-Family Households
There is also extensive information on people residing in group quarters in the 2010 Census, which has the tabulations below:
People in Group Quarters: College
People in Group Quarters: Military
People in Group Quarters: Navy Ships
People in Group Quarters: Other
People in Group Quarters: Homeless
People in Group Quarters: Group Homes
People in Group Quarters: Residential Treatment
People in Group Quarters: Merchant Ships
People in Group Quarters: Workers’ Group Living Quarters
People in Group Quarters: Other Other
People in Group Quarters: Institutionalized
Using this information, Maptitude 2019 includes a corrected data set of household size distributions for Census Tracts and Block Groups to account for the under-representation of one-person households in the Census data.
Census tracts with Caliper derived households. (Image: Caliper)Census tracts with Census household count. (Image: Caliper)
Administered by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the mission of IGAPP is to streamline the deployment of commercial mobile apps to government personnel by bridging the gap between traditional government contracting procedures and non-traditional businesses.
Blue Marble’s GIS software is used by hundreds of thousands of mapping professionals throughout the world who need affordable, user-friendly, yet powerful GIS solutions. Users come from a wide range of industries including software, oil and gas, mining, civil engineering, surveying and technology companies, as well as government departments and academic institutions.
Available on both iOS and Android platforms, Global Mapper Mobile enables remote access to mission-critical geospatial datasets in an easy-to-use application. Used in conjunction with the desktop version of the software, Global Mapper Mobile supports hundreds of GIS data formats — both raster and vector — and offers simple, form-based field data collection and geotagged photo capture.
To address the specific needs of the geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) community, the IGAPP version of Global Mapper Mobile includes streaming access to online data services and the ability to store downloaded tiles for remote offline use.
“IGAPP provides mission-relevant, cyber secure mobile apps to warfighters, aviators, mariners and first-responders,” according to John Holcomb, IGAPP program manager at Engility, the NGS’s broker for putting commercial applications into the GEOINT App Store. “The program provides commercial vendors with a rapid, cost effective, path to sell their products. We are thrilled to add the Global Mapper Mobile the store and look forward to getting into the hands of DoD users.”
“Over the years, the GEOINT community has strongly supported our products and has provided valuable feedback that has helped ensure the functionality of our software is addressing the needs of geo-intelligence,” stated Patrick Cunningham, Blue Marble President. “We are delighted that Global Mapper Mobile is now available through IGAPP and that more and more field personnel now have easy access to this valuable app.”
Golden Software, a developer of software for data visualization and analysis, has released Version 14 of the Grapher scientific graphing package with new plotting and customizing functionality. Available today, Grapher 14 is downloadable by all users with active maintenance agreements.
A preview version of Grapher 15 is now available, giving active users pre-release access to new fit curve and statistical plotting capabilities.
“Grapher users will find we have focused overall on making the software easier to use in version 14 and the version 15 Preview,” said Leslie McWhirter, Grapher product manager. “New plotting functions were created as a direct result of feedback from users.”
The Grapher software gives users deeper insights into their data by providing them with 80 flexible and easy-to-use 2D and 3D graphing tools for plotting, analyzing and displaying scientific data sets. The package is used extensively by scientists and engineers in oil & gas operations, hydrologic/geochemical studies, environmental consulting, mineral exploration and academic research.
The most notable new or upgraded features in Grapher 14 include the following:
Enhanced Plotting – Ability to plot data in rows and columns, perform one-button Durov class plots, and easily generate multi-plot reports.
Improved Bar Charts – Bar charts are more versatile, offering variable bar widths and differentiated fill colors for negative and positive.
With Grapher 14 now available, Golden Software developers have already begun creating the Preview version of Grapher 15. This allows customers to try new functions relatively early in the development process and provide feedback before the final version is released.
“In Grapher 15 Preview, we are developing new features related to fit curve, axes and statistical functionality,” said McWhirter. “These will improve the ability of Grapher users to model, analyze and interpret their data.”
Specifically, these Grapher 15 upgrades will include:
Fit Curve Improvements – At the request of geologists, geophysicists, mining and oil-and-gas professionals, it is now possible to add X=F(Y) fit curves to model borehole log data. Fit curves can now also be added to class plots to model all or individual classes.
Axes Upgrades – Break Axes are enhanced so users can customize the break mark and add a break distinguisher to the plot itself. Ternary plots have also been upgraded to enable users to rotate the axis direction, a useful option in geochemical analysis.
Statistical Enhancements – Grapher 15 Preview will give users greater control over how values in Box-Whisker plots are graphed. In addition, there will be new mathematical options to expand on the functionality of the summation plot.
Other upgrades in Grapher 15 Preview will include the following:
Vary color fills above and below the intersection of two plots
Specify custom colors via RGB values to color scatter plot symbols
Assign colors from a gradient to scatter plot symbols based on numeric worksheet values
Grapher exports integrate seamlessly with all Golden Software packages, including Surfer for data visualization and mapping, Voxler for 3D data rendering, and Strater for subsurface modeling.
Topographic surface with well sample data and water level. (Image: Golden Software)
Golden Software, a developer of scientific graphics software, has enhanced the visualization capabilities in version 16 of its Surfer gridding, contouring and 3D surface mapping package. Geologists, environmental consultants and geospatial professionals can use Surfer 16 to interpret complex scientific data.
“We have improved every aspect of core functionality in Surfer 16 so it’s faster and easier to make meaningful custom maps,” said Golden Software CEO Blakelee Mills. “Surfer users will find the new version generates more accurate representations of physical, chemical and structural properties, allowing them to make better decisions.”
Surfer is a robust 3D data visualization and mapping software that enables users to model their data sets, apply an array of advanced analytics tools, and graphically communicate the results. Known for its fast and powerful contouring algorithms, Surfer is used extensively by geologists in mining and oil & gas activities and by hydrologists in environmental monitoring projects.
The primary improvements in Surfer 16 have been made in the color mapping and Contour Map capabilities:
Equal Area Stretch. Similar to Histogram Equalization, this new feature lets the user stretch colors across the distribution of data, creating a proportionate representation of the data variation and enhancing the visualization’s contrast. This means that tightly distributed data can be displayed as quickly varying colors in the generated colormap, making it easier to spot anomalies in data values. Colors can be stretched automatically or manually across the histogram of data values.
Equal Area Contouring. Another new feature added to surface mapping functionality, Equal Area Contouring allows the user to calculate the geographic distribution of contours so they align more precisely with the geophysical data they represent. This results in a more accurate visualization of geophysical data sets, which are seldom linearly distributed.
“The combination of Equal Area Stretch and Contouring creates striking visual maps that vividly highlight data distribution,” said Mills. “This makes it easier to interpret and understand geophysical and geochemical concentrations in the subsurface.”
Surfer 16 includes three other enhancements:
True 3D Point Data. Surfer has always accurately displayed lidar point cloud data, and this 3D visualization capability has been expanded. Now any 3D vector data can be represented in three dimensions in 3D View. Clients who use Surfer to visualize subsurface wells can use this to display the well path. It can also be applied to quickly check the quality of 3D grids.
Enhanced Attribute Management. Surfer now has commands to calculate geometry — such as area or perimeter length — and add those values to object attributes. These calculations can be performed either to create new attributes or modify existing ones with updated information. One of the key advantages of this enhancement is that area data can be normalized and attributed to objects for generation of more accurate choropleth maps.
Kriging with External Drift. Surfer is known for its powerful kriging functions, and this capability is even better in v16 with the addition of Kriging with External Drift. This allows users to add a secondary data set for use as a proxy in interpolating the primary data set with the goal of yielding better estimated values. Surfer users asked for this new function because it typically lets them obtain and use less expensive data sets to supplement a more expensive one.
“Surfer has a reputation for high-quality graphic outputs, powerful gridding algorithms, and ease of use – and we have improved each of these capabilities in Surfer 16,” Mills said.
LandViewer, a cloud service developed by EOS Data Analytics, provides access to satellite data and fast-paced analytics. In recent months, it has undergone numerous updates, which have expanded the existing catalogue of satellite imagery, introduced more tools for analysis and added other new features.
By the end of 2018, free space and airborne data available for browsing, analysis and download via LandViewer included imagery from the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-1, NASA-USGS’s Landsat 8 and previous missions, MODIS, CBERS-4 and NAIP.
This broad selection of Earth observation data has grown even larger with the addition of high-resolution commercial imagery from Airbus, SpaceWill and SI Imaging Services.
LandViewer has evolved into a single platform. On top of open-source data, users can freely explore the potential of commercial data with global coverage, short revisit periods, and spatial resolution up to 40 centimeters.
The current catalogue includes imagery from Pléiades 1a/1b, SPOT 5, SPOT 6 and SPOT 7, along with KOMPSAT-2, 3, 3A and SuperView. The high-resolution imagery browser offers free preview, automatic price calculation by selected area, and fast image delivery within three business days via cloud EOS Storage.
Preview of KOMPSAT-3A image collected over Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport on Oct. 29, 2018. (Photo: EOS)
Long-term observations. An abundance of available data, such as weekly updated Sentinel-2 imagery and historical Landsat data, has made it much easier to monitor changes over long time spans. Rather than taking a long time to select and process years of satellite data to get a multitemporal perspective, the LandViewer’s new Time Series Analysis will crunch the remote sensing data and deliver the results in an easily interpretable graph.
Sentinel-2 time series graph generated for agricultural fields in Kansas state. (Screenshot: EOS)
Users can select an area of interest (AOI), and a satellite dataset and a time period between 1 month and 10 years. The algorithm can then pick all imagery with minimum cloudiness and calculate NDVI, NDWI or NDSI in just a few moments. By default, the generated Time Series graph contains lines (representing the min, max, mean and std values) that can be hidden or displayed for convenience; whenever an unusual spike or drop in values is noticed, a satellite scene that represents that part of the curve can be visualized to establish the cause. The results can be downloaded either as an image (.png), or a .csv file for working in Excel.
Enhanced vegetation analysis. Users searching for an in-depth look at vegetation cover can use LandViewer’s new spectral indexes: SAVI, EVI, ARVI, GCI, SIPI and NBR. These indexes complement generalized NDVI analysis by making corrections for atmospheric and topographic effects or soil brightness influences, depending on vegetation density, climate and elevation in the area of interest.
The NBR index is designed to highlight burned areas against healthy vegetation; the difference between pre-fire NBR and post-fire NBR values can be applied to estimate the severity of burn.
The use of several indexes simultaneously enables better insight into plant health and helps to identify stressed or infected vegetation at an early stage.
Sentinel-2-derived SAVI analysis of an arid agricultural region in Saudi Arabia. (Screenshot: EOS)
User-friendly legend and area calculation. Another new LandViewer feature, the index legend, is designed to solve the problem of interpreting the index results, a common issue for new users. Now when a spectral index is applied over the selected territory, the user can view a detailed legend, where each color-marked class contains a short description.
For example, calculation of NDVI will identify and highlight areas with “dense”, “moderate”, “sparse vegetation”, “open soil” or “no vegetation”.
Screenshot: EOS
Another new time-saving functionality is that the area of each class within the spectral index legend is calculated automatically, in both square meters and by percentage.
Also, the expanded Area of Interest (AOI) tool enables bulk uploading of AOIs and speeds up work by allowing simultaneous visualization and fast switching of all AOIs on a map for imagery searches or new scene subscription.
Advanced zone analytics. By introducing the clustering function, EOS’ remote sensing experts and software developers have taken LandViewer’s spatio-temporal analytics to the next level. With this function, users can run unsupervised satellite data-based classification of an area up to 200 square kilometers into as many as 19 clusters (or zones). This process involves setting custom parameters (size/number of zones) and waiting a few moments for LandViewer to build a raster image of the area with color-marked zones, and a vector layer outlining the boundaries. Both outputs can be downloaded.
This scalable analysis can provide various insights across agriculture, forestry, coastal monitoring and other industries. For example, a farmer can make use of convenient color mapping of zones within the field based on NDVI values for precise in-field navigation and crop management.
Engaging animations. With the informative spectral data contained in satellite image pixels, LandViewer has introduced a time-lapse animation feature allowing journalists and active social media users to create engaging animated stories and share them on the internet. Each GIF can contain up to 300 scenes, with indexes or band combinations applied. From calving of glaciers to construction of new stadiums, satellite imagery is full of information that’s worth watching and sharing with the world.
Hexagon AB has signed an agreement to acquire Thermopylae Sciences and Technology, a software provider primarily focused on the U.S. government and defense market that specializes in geospatial applications, mobile frameworks and cloud computing for enhanced location intelligence.
Thermopylae has developed advanced visualization solutions to support tactical edge mapping in support of mission critical operations. Built upon the Google technology stack, its defense and intelligence solutions are targeted at addressing the challenges involved in working with critical problem sets in secure or classified government environments.
In addition, its portfolio is applicable to a host of markets in the private sector, including real estate, finance, insurance, retail and media, with customers ranging from startups to Fortune 50 companies.
“Thermopylae’s software and domain expertise nicely augment our ability to deliver the visual location intelligence necessary for enabling autonomous connected ecosystems,” said Hexagon President and CEO Ola Rollén. “Ultimately, the addition of Thermopylae will enrich the 5D experience delivered through our Hexagon Smart M.App and Luciad portfolios — both of which enable smart digital realities with 3D, 4D (real-time sensor feed integration) and 5D (dynamic analytics) capabilities. Not only does the acquisition provide an avenue for international market adoption of Thermopylae’s technologies but also an additional avenue for Hexagon to accelerate adoption of our 5D visualization capabilities in U.S. government agencies.”
Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, Thermopylae will operate as a part of Hexagon’s Geospatial division, which is reported under the Geospatial Enterprise Solutions segment. Sales in 2017 amounted to $20 million.
Completion of the transaction (closing) is subject to customary regulatory approvals, including a voluntary filing to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).
Airbus Defence and Space has launched The OneAtlas Platform, a collaborative environment to access premium imagery, perform large-scale image processing, extract insights and benefit from Airbus assets for solution development.
OneAtlas is offering a 30-day free trial, giving customers streaming access to imagery, sample change detection reports, and global imagery and data layers, including the basemap and the WorldDEM.
Besides access to a comprehensive archive with premium imagery, users can try services such as:
Ocean Finder for the maritime industry
Verde for precision agriculture
Starling for forest management
Earth Monitor for tracking changes over an area of interest
The developer portal provides more information through API documentation and discusses how to benefit from the imagery either in streaming or download format.
The Ocean Finder provides a satellite-based maritime ship detection service. (Photo: OneAtlas)
