Tag: technology

Mapping ‘Hell on Earth’

A mapping feature from GPS World magazine’s June issue.

STILL BURNING: This false-color image shows burned areas in yellow and healthy vegetation in purple. The bright spots are where the fire was actively burning when the image was taken. (Image courtesy of DigitalGlobe, © 2016)
On May 1, a wildfire ignited southwest of Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. At first, wildfire MWF-009 seemed like others residents had experienced — smoke and haze, but no real danger. Two days later, the winds shifted.

The fire swept through Fort McMurray, destroying more than 1,600 homes and buildings and forcing the largest wildfire evacuation in Alberta’s history.

People described it as hell on Earth, comparing the disaster to movies, war, and the apocalypse. By the end of the week, the fire had grown to more than 101,000 hectares, significantly larger than the city of Calgary.

BURN SCAR: On May 4, the Landsat 7 satellite’s Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus acquired this false-color image combining shortwave infrared, near infrared and green light (bands 5-4-2). Near- and short-wave infrared help penetrate clouds and smoke to reveal hot spots of fire (red), smoke (white) and burned areas (brown).

The entire city population of 88,000 evacuated in a rush, many through falling embers from wildfires beside roadways.

On May 5, DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-3 satellite (WV-3) peered through smoke using shortwave infrared to take the image on the left. GIS analysts can also measure the intensity of the fire using the image.

As of press time, the fires continue to spread across northeast Alberta, impacting Canada’s oil sand operations, and into the neighboring province of Saskatchewan.

The wildfire may become the most costly disaster in Canadian history.

June 2, 2016
Mongolia adopts what3words as national addressing system

Mongol Post, Mongolia’s national postal delivery service, has adopted the addressing platform what3words for postal deliveries to customers across the country.

The three-word address shops.maps.exonerates is a tent home. (Photo: what3ords)

Mongolia covers an area nearly the size of the European Union, but has no consistent addressing system. what3words has developed a accurate address for every 3 x 3-meter square in the world, and Mongol Post is now making this address system integral to its service and a part of the infrastructure that will help drive the country’s economic development.

Mongolia — known for its nomadic population and vast, sparsely populated landscape — faces unique challenges when it comes to postal services. In many parts of the country, citizens have to collect mail from post office boxes dozens of kilometers away from their homes.

The what3words address of this location is uniform.resettle.wakes. (Photo: what3words)

Other customers have no access to postal services or deliveries at all. When deliveries are made, descriptive directions (for example, “opposite the gas station, near the Internet Cafe”) and landmarks are often the only way to specify a location; customers regularly provide a mobile phone number on the envelope so the driver can call for directions.

Failed deliveries are commonplace, inconveniencing citizens, holding back the operations of both businesses and government, and raising the cost of deliveries.

Vast stretches of uninhabited land characterize much of Mongolia. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Mongol Post is the country’s largest postal service provider, with 900 employees serving more than 3 million citizens, 30 percent of whom are nomadic, roaming an area of more than 1.5 million square kilometers. As a rapidly emerging market, Mongolia needs a functioning address system to sustain its economic development and attract investment.

what3words is a multi-award winning location reference system based on a global grid of 57 trillion 3 x 3-meter squares. Each square has been pre-assigned a fixed and unique three-word address. The system is available as a mobile app or API integration and works both online and offline. It makes it easy to discover an address, communicate it and deliver to it.

Mongol Post customers will be able to discover any three-word address using the free app, and write it on an envelope or enter it on the checkout page of a shopping website. Every citizen now has an address, whether they live in rural areas, the Ger districts (informal settlements in the capital) or the center of Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia.

what3words will be integrated across Mongol Post’s internal systems, while postal workers will use the three-word address to navigate directly to the 3 x 3-meter square where they will find the customer’s front door.

June 1, 2016
Presentations and videos available from first gvSIG Festival

Presentations and videos from the first gvSIG Festival are now available online. The festival — a virtual conference about free geomatics — was held May 23-27, offering 25 presentations in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish and Russian.

All of the presentation material is now available, as well as recordings of every session. The material can be filtered by language.

The festival was sponsored by the gvSIG Association.

June 1, 2016
Lidar drone market will be worth US$144.6 million by 2022

According to a new market research report published by MarketsandMarkets, the Lidar drone market was valued US$16.1 million in 2015 and is estimated to reach US$144.6 million by 2022 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35.2% between 2016 and 2022.

The full report is titled “Lidar Drone Market by Product (Rotary Wing, and Fixed Wing), Component, Application (Corridor Mapping, Archaeology, Construction, Environment, Entertainment, and Precision Agriculture), Geography — Global Forecast to 2022,” and is available through the MarketsandMarkets website.

The 125-page report includes and 66 market data tables and 42 figures.

Factors such as technological superiority, encouragement from governments and institutes for adoption of lidar drones, and its use in emerging applications such as precision farming are the key drivers for the growth of the lidar drone market. The use of lidar drones for delivering products generates further opportunities for lidar drone manufacturers.

Rotary-wing. The rotary-wing lidar drone market is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. The ability of rotary-wing lidar drones to take off without runways and its high degree of maneuverability are the reasons for the high growth of this market.

Corridor mapping. The corridor mapping application held the largest share of the market in 2015. Highway corridors are built after proper planning and designing to ensure that they can withstand the pressure exerted by vehicles on a regular basis.

As highway projects are constructed from a long-term perspective, it is necessary to conduct a thorough feasibility study of the terrain on which the highway is to be constructed. Lidar drones provide this information by building three-dimensional (3D) elevation models of the surveyed area.

Infrastructure development is further expected to increase in coming years, which would, in turn, lead to increased usage of lidar drones for inspecting the growth of the infrastructure project. These benefits drive the market in the corridor mapping application.

North America. The North American market held the largest share of the global lidar drone market in 2015. The increasing awareness about the benefits of lidar drones such as high accuracy and low cost is one of the reasons for the large market share of the North American lidar drone market. The use of lidar drones in precision farming is driving the lidar drone market in North America.

Major players. The major players operating in this market are Velodyne Lidar (U.S.), Phoenix Aerial Systems (U.S), Riegl Laser Measurement Systems GmbH (Austria), SICK AG (Germany), and YellowScan (France), 3D Robotics, Inc. (U.S.), DJI (China), FARO Technology (U.S.), Leica Geosystems AG (Switzerland), Optech, Inc. (Canada) and Trimble Navigation Limited (U.S.).

The research report categorizes the global lidar drone market on the basis of components, products, applications and geography. It describes the drivers, restraints, opportunities and challenges in the lidar drone market. The Porter’s five forces analysis has been included in the report with a description of each of its forces and its respective impact on the market.

Related Reports

Lidar Market by Product (Aerial, Ground-based, and UAV LiDAR), Component, Application (Corridor Mapping, Engineering, Environment, ADAS, Urban Planning, Exploration, and Metrology), Services and Geography – Global Forecast to 2022

UAV Drones Market by Type (Fixed Wing, Rotary Blade, Nano, Hybrid), Application (Law Enforcement, Precision Agriculture, Media and Entertainment, Retail), & Geography (Americas, Europe, APAC, RoW) – Analysis & Forecast to 2020

May 27, 2016
TerraGo partners with high-accuracy Positioning Solutions

TerraGo is partnering with Positioning Solutions International (PSI), a provider of high-accuracy positioning solutions for infrastructure, land management, agriculture and related industries.

PSI is an authorized reseller of TerraGo Edge software and offers a full range of turnkey systems and services that combine mobile data-collection software from TerraGo with high-accuracy GNSS receivers from CHC Navigation.

“What’s great about TerraGo Edge is that it’s designed to be customized out of the box, so we can give our customers and dealers a mobile solution tailored to their specific industry and unique workflow requirements,” said Charlie Towne, president, Positioning Solutions International. “And because it integrates seamlessly with the line of CHC receivers, we can provide any level of accuracy the job requires, even real-time centimeter RTK, directly on a smartphone or tablet.”

“The PSI team has decades of experience deploying high-accuracy positioning technology to meet the most demanding customer requirements, and they understand how to help organizations use BYOD solutions to seamlessly replace legacy, proprietary technology,” said John Timar, vice president, Worldwide Sales, TerraGo. “They bring the industry experience and subject matter expertise to our projects that guarantee successful outcomes for our mutual customers using TerraGo Edge, so they can improve accuracy while realizing tremendous cost savings and improving efficiency with a modern, mobile solution.”

PSI provides solutions to customers and a network of value-added dealers, and is the exclusive southeastern regional territory distributor for the CHC Navigation brand of GPS/GNSS products and network solutions.

May 26, 2016
Esri introduces high-precision GNSS mobile GIS software

In its 47-year history, Esri has never before built a high-precision GNSS mobile GIS software . Sure, one could connect a high-precision GNSS receiver to ArcGIS Mobile or even ArcGIS desktop running on a tablet, but in those cases and all others, there’s no direct support for high-precision GNSS receivers.

By support, I mean the software features that one needs to automatically collect reliable, verifiable and defensible high-precision GNSS coordinates and associated metadata, like real-time estimated accuracy, correction age and other metadata that can be referenced months or years later to understand the quality of the data collected.

Until now…

Collector for ArcGIS is a cross-platform mobile GIS app that’s available for iOS, Windows 10 and Android. Until now, Collector did not differentiate between low-precision GNSS data (for instance, a smartphone’s internal GNSS receiver) and RTK GNSS (centimeter-accuracy) receivers, so it was difficult to know what sort of accuracy one was achieving even when a centimeter-accurate receiver was connected to it.

Esri is on its way to solving this problem.

Earlier this month, Esri introduced a beta version of the new Collector for ArcGIS mobile GIS software that incorporates features for high-precision GNSS data collection. While Collector has been around for a few years, it has not allowed the user to differentiate between low-precision GNSS data (such as a smartphone internal GNSS receiver) and RTK GNSS (centimeter-accuracy) receivers. To circumvent that limitation, high-precision GNSS receiver vendors offered companion apps that run concurrently with Collector to display metadata. However, that’s not a fun solution because if the user wants to records GNSS metadata, he would have to tab between apps and hand-enter the GNSS metadata into attribute fields in Collector.

Another nagging problem for high-precision GNSS users with Collector is the lack of an on-the-fly datum transformation feature. Sources of high-precision GNSS receiver corrections come in different datum flavors (ITRF08, NAD83/2011, NAD83/CSRS, etc.). Those datum flavors don’t necessarily match a user’s GIS database, sometimes introducing a meter or more of error.

Historically, Collector didn’t give the user an opportunity to apply an on-the-fly datum transformation to reconcile datum differences between the high-precision GNSS receiver datum and the geodatabase datum. Yeah, you could fix it later by applying a datum shift after the fact, but it’s a tedious and laborious task to do so, and sort of defeats the purpose of having an efficient real-time GNSS data collection workflow.

I was using the beta version of iOS Collector for ArcGIS this week with a survey-grade RTK GNSS receiver that, according to GPS World’s 2016 Receiver Survey, delivers 1-centimeter RTK accuracy. Setting up the GNSS correction profile is a bit tricky. There are three settings you need to select. Following is a screen capture of the profile settings I used for RTK in Collector when the RTK base was referenced to NAD83/2011:

When setting up a GNSS receiver profile to use WAAS/SBAS as a source of corrections in Collector, you’ll need to select GCS ITRF 2008 instead of GCS NAD 1983 2011.

Once I got the proper datum transformations dialed in, RTK GNSS accuracy was where it should be when compared to a survey mark (3.7mm):

Another tricky area with Collector is the GNSS metadata. It’s great that Collector supports automated GNSS metadata recording, but in order for Collector to record GNSS metadata, you’ll need to follow the Esri data model for GNSS metadata. Essentially, add fields to your database that will be populated. Here’s a link to the supported GNSS metadata fields. http://arcg.is/22h41yR. Note that you’ll need to log in using your Esri account credentials to view the link.

I didn’t add the GNSS metadata fields to the database to try it because this iOS beta version doesn’t support GNSS metadata (Esri says it will be supported on the next beta release), I did collect a bit of data. Here’s what the Collector screen looks like:

Some of the fields on the iPad Mini were cut off (I’ll report that to Esri), but you can see that it is entirely possible for Collector (iOS) to accept and record data from an iPad using an RTK GNSS receiver (note accuracy value at the bottom left corner of the screen.

So, to Esri’s credit, they’ve appeared to address the GNSS metadata and datum transformation problems in the beta release of Collector, making it the first Esri mobile GIS that supports high-precision GNSS. The iOS and Windows 10 beta versions are available now to users who register for Esri’s Collector beta program. For support and answers to questions, you can visit Geonet.

Before you get too excited, even with the new features Collector is still a light-weight mobile GIS and likely always will be, as long as it’s a free app (although not always free to use). But this is certainly a move in the right direction for high-precision GNSS receiver users who want to live in the Esri ArcGIS Online/Portal/Server ecosystem and rid themselves of shp files.

Some of you may beg to differ that Collector is Esri’s first high-precision GNSS mobile GIS data collection software. I know ArcPad has been around for years and has supported high-precision GNSS receivers for many years. In fact, if you install the GeoBullsEye plug-in, ArcPad becomes the only 3D, high-precision GNSS data collection software that works real time in the Esri AGOL/Portal/Server ecosystem. But, it wasn’t built by Esri :-). An Australian company named Maptel built ArcPad, and then Esri acquired the company a few years ago.

While the beta versions of Collector for Windows 10 and iOS are available now, Esri reports that the beta version of Collector for Android should be available next week.

Thanks, and see you next month.
Follow me on Twitter at GPSGIS_Eric

May 19, 2016
Smart maps track Zika outbreaks globally

Colombia – Percent Change in Cumulative Zika Cases by Department, Feb. 13 -March 26, 2016.

Pacific Disaster Center (PDC) is using the Esri platform to track the outbreak of the Zika virus on a global scale. By sharing mapped intelligence with health services and aid responders, PDC is able to provide essential information that defines the characteristics of the virus and its carrier’s breeding grounds.

“Esri provides the backbone for visualizing an event and understanding the locality and context for any disaster, including the Zika virus,” said Ray Shirkhodai, PDC executive director.

The center provides situational awareness information for all manner of disasters. Esri, the world leader in geographic information system (GIS) software, creates technology that generates smart maps derived from a wide variety of data resources and then publishes them across information networks.

PDC uses these capabilities to add different data layers — hospital density, rain, vector programs, and so forth—to maps. Maps make it easier and faster for disaster managers to understand the scope of a region’s vulnerability to disease. The center serves its map products around the world to organizations that depend on it for intelligence about specific regions.

“Esri GIS technology specifically allows us to characterize the Zika virus outbreak and contextualize it for decision makers,” explained Joseph Green, PDC’s health risk specialist. “Our maps describe the distribution of suspected cases at national levels throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.”

PDC gathers Zika virus information from weekly epidemiology updates and bulletins obtained from health organizations worldwide. In return, the center publishes regular updates, including online maps that track the increase and decrease of reported and suspected cases over time.

The solution to containing the Zika virus is to dispose of mosquitos, which carry the disease. Mapping regional vulnerabilities to virus outbreaks highlights the value of mosquito management programs. Learn more about using GIS for vector-borne disease surveillance and control at go.esri.com/vector-ready.

May 18, 2016
Harris to offer Icaros OneButton for advanced UAS image processing

Icaros Inc., a provider of aerial remote sensing services and software, has announced that Harris Geospatial Solutions, a division of Harris Corporation, will offer the Icaros OneButton family of image processing software as a front-end complement to its ENVI geospatial analytics solution for users extracting information from manned and unmanned aerial sensor data.

“Together, OneButton and ENVI create a complete image processing and analytics workflow for aerial image data,” said Tom Bosanko, Icaros CEO. “Both packages are highly customizable to meet the needs of specific vertical market applications.”

Icaros developed the OneButton family for geospatial end users to easily and automatically generate precise, fully orthorectified 2D maps and 3D models from frame-based aerial imaging systems. Originally engineered for manned aircraft sensors, the OneButton software has been modified to accommodate the collection conditions of unmanned aerial systems (UAS).

“The combination of OneButton and ENVI provide best-of-breed, application-specific image processing and analytics, that enable customers to solve challenging problems related to everything from agriculture and forestry to utilities and city planning,” said Beau Legeer of Harris Geospatial Solutions.

OneButton automatically processes raw raster imagery with onboard GPS/IMU data to stitch the individual scenes together into a seamless, color-balanced orthomosaic meeting photogrammetric standards.

Outputs include digital elevation models (DEMs), true color 3D point clouds, multispectral mosaics and controlled oblique imagery — all ready for ingest directly into the ENVI software environment.

OneButton comes in both Standard and Professional versions. The Standard package asks the end user to specify the application and terrain type for the project at hand. The software then intuitively sets parameters of the photogrammetric engine to perform the mosaicking to the level of precision required. For example, the processing algorithms would handle flat agricultural fields different from a rolling urban landscape.

“The Professional version is more customizable, allowing end users to adjust the processing parameters themselves based on the precision they need, and then edit the resulting mosaic to remove anomalies, like an airplane moving down a runway. OneButton Professional was specifically designed to generate results with the efficiency and accuracy necessary for large scale projects and survey-quality results,” Bosanko said.

OneButton is platform and sensor agnostic, and processes raster image data from small-, medium-, and large-format frame sensors capable of capturing visible RBG, multispectral, near-infrared and thermal infrared data.

The OneButton solution for ENVI is available now to existing and new customers, and both companies expect further technology integration in the near future around cloud enablement of the UAS data processing and analytics workflow.

May 18, 2016
Introduction to the 2016 USGIF GEOINT Symposium

Geointelligence Insider’s Art Kalinski is reporting live from the GEOINT 2016 Symposium, which is being held May 15-18 in Orlando, Fla.

Hosted and produced by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF), a non-profit, non-lobbying educational organization, the annual GEOINT Symposium is the nation’s largest gathering of industry, academia and government to include defense, intelligence and Homeland Security Communities as well as commercial, federal/civil, state and local geospatial intelligence stakeholders.

May 17, 2016
Blazegraph update enables geospatial searching

Blazegraph, creator of a high-performance database for large graphs, is now offering version 2.1.0. Updates of the graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerated program give users faster, easier access to key data sets, such as new support for processing geospatial coordinates and optimizing queries against the National Center for Biotechnology Information’s (NCBI) PubChem database.

In addition, Blazegraph 2.1.0 provides new tools that enable semantic search on the largest data published in the Linked Open Data structure, which is heavily used in global publishing, cultural and open government projects.

To deliver the speed and performance needed to work with these massive data sets, version 2.1.0 includes significant improvements to its bulk load and query performance capabilities.

Blazegraph 2.1.0 users are powering complex SPARQL queries to uncover new insights. For example, Wikidata, the free knowledge-base community, has deployed version 2.1.0 to power its query service. With it, data experts are using the geospatial capabilities to create graphs such as shared state borders in the United States, a map of all earthquakes and a map of chemical elements and their discovery locations.

Another Blazegraph user, Seven Bridges, is a biomedical data analysis company selected by the National Cancer Institute to develop the Cancer Genomic Cloud program. This first complete ecosystem gives cancer researchers immediate access to one of the world’s largest genomic data sets — The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) — and the computational resources to analyze it.

“We chose Blazegraph to manage the metadata on the Cancer Genomics Cloud because it helps researchers to easily build complex queries based on how they think, not on how the data is stored,” said Igor Bogicevic, CTO at Seven Bridges. “In addition to helping scientists find the data they need, Blazegraph and its new 2.1.0 version is just plain fast. It helps us deliver the scale and performance needed to meet some of the biggest cancer genomics data analysis challenges.”

Learn more at the Blazegraph website.

May 16, 2016
GeoBullseye for ArcPad version 2 released

GeoMobile Innovations has released GeoBullseye for ArcPad version 2. GeoBullseye is a software extension that turns Esri’s ArcPad mobile GIS software into a high-accuracy GNSS, three dimensional (collecting X, Y and Z) solution supporting Esri workflows.

GeoBullseye supports accurate collection of positions and quality-control GNSS attributes for confident deployment in horizontal XY and vertical Z, including GEOID12 for accurate Mean Sea Level (MSL) elevations.

GeoBullseye displays real-time estimated accuracies on the ArcPad main map screen and supports automated recording of GNSS/GIS metadata, including key horizontal and vertical accuracy metrics and real-time differential correction status results.

Version 2 collects up to 35 configurable “auto” attributes to support confidence in critical field data-collection efforts. GeoBullseye is a XY and Z centimeter accuracy RTK GNSS collection solution that can be tightly integrated in a fully disconnected workflow with ArcGIS as well as connected, real-time synchronization with ArcGIS Online (AGOL) and/or ArcGIS Server including SDE environments.

“The high-accuracy GNSS 3D mobile GIS solution and can be deployed with today’s various Esri workflows,” said Geomobile Innovations President Richard Ash. “We recognize that centimeter-level GNSS data collection is a strong trend in mobile GIS and are excited to bring that capability to the Esri environment.”

Furthermore, GeoBullseye Version 2 implements a rigorous 14-parameter datum transformation to solve a critical horizontal datum shift problem for the specialized positioning needs of North American GPS users mapping in NAD83 (2011 epoch) datum while using satellite-based augmentation service (SBAS) such as WAAS or commercial services like Atlas, OmniSTAR, Terrastar and Starfire. Those services produce coordinates that are referenced to the ITRF08 datum, which is substantially different (greater than 1 meter) from NAD83/2011, the national standard in the U.S.

“Professional groups such as small and large utilities, engineering, land and natural-resource impact consultants and more are seeking confident collection of high-accuracy RTK horizontal and vertical positions and the ability to efficiently cycle this data to and from the field and update their GIS, perhaps when they return to the office or in real-time out in the field,” Ash said. “GeoBullsye for ArcPad is an easy-to-use solution that checks the critical ‘must-have’ boxes for organizations that want to streamline their field collection to GIS back-end workflows. It supports the key data elements necessary for reporting, and defending their horizontal and vertical GNSS data collection efforts.”

GeoBullseye V2 is priced at US$295.00. It is available for purchase through GeoMobile and authorized GeoMobile GNSS reseller specialists.

May 13, 2016
eyesMap3D software provides high-quality 3D models

3D model created using eyesMap3D software.

Technology company eCapture has launched a new software program, eyesMap3D, to generate accurate 3D models and point clouds, measured directly from images.

EyesMap3D allows users to create high-density points clouds with textures achieving a realistic 3D model appearance. In addition, eyesMap3D is able to measure accurately on the images, generate true orthophotos, and geo-reference and scale the results.

eyesMap3D users can use their cameras, mobile phone or camera drone to capture images. It is compatible with most popular software packages on the market.

The goal of the company is to allow the user to easily generate and work with 3D models and photogrammetric tools, while maintaining data quality.

In 2015, eCapture launched the eyesMap tablet for modeling 3D scenes indoors and outdoors. The EyesMap tablet is a versatile instrument for users who needs results directly while working in the field.

eyesMap3D software is offering three licenses: educational, public organizations and business. The software can be downloaded from the eCapture website.

3D model of small object (a bracelet) made using eyesMap3D software.

May 10, 2016