Synth Export

Friday, 22 October, 2010

This just hit my desk from the excellent ISPRS Commission V on Close-Range Sensing (and check out the useful “Tips” section):

Photosynth has suddenly become a lot more interesting now that there is a useful utility to extract data from your synths! Microsoft’s Photosynth always looked very interesting and potentially powerful, but of little value as it seemed impossible to derive quantitative information from it, until now!

Synthexport is a freely available utility which allows the extraction of automatically measured XYZ coordinates and estimated camera parameter/inner orientation data. Enjoy!


For those not in the know, Photosynth is an online Microsoft service that:

…takes your photos, mashes them together and recreates a 3D scene out of them that anyone can view and move around in.

Yes its photogrammetry, but up to this point has been purely an online activity. Which makes Synth Export incredibly useful. Next step will be to start playing with this in anger.

TanDEM Mission now operational

Friday, 22 October, 2010

The TanDEM mission is now operational. I blogged on the launch of TanDEM-X earlier this summer, but this link is worth a read just to highlight how unique a mission this is and also to look forward to seeing what the data is like.

Map World

Friday, 22 October, 2010

Map World has been released by China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping using imagery collected over the last four years. Its interesting to see another “take” on the Google Maps idea; its not bad but no where near as slick as Google’s service. The BBC provide a more detailed review with this snippet quite useful:

Within the nation’s borders, images have a 2.5m resolution in rural areas and can go down to 0.6m resolution in 300 cities. Beyond its borders, images have a 500m resolution and many nations are blank when users zoom in.

One to watch simply because its a completely different set of data.

dlgv32 Pro Viewer

Thursday, 21 October, 2010

FGT recently blogged about the free USGS dlgv32 Pro viewer. This provides some of the history to Global Mapper which I wasn’t aware of in my earlier post. OK, so it’s not quite the swiss army knife of RS software that Global Mapper is, but still damn useful.

Licensing Updates

Friday, 8 October, 2010

Ed Parsons has a couple of useful recent blog posts on data licensing. Specifically the clarification of derived data for OS licenses and open government licensing (which might include OS OpenData but I’m not entirely clear). For the OS licensing, the key points Ed draws out are:

  • no restrictions on deriving or displaying data based on OS Opendata datasets
  • data collected by independent means (GPS, field survey) and then verified in relation to OS data is free of OS restrictions
  • licensing data for business use, are able to infer the position or create new data without restrictions as long as the new data is not a direct copy of an existing feature in the OS product

All good stuff and increases the ability to incorporate (some) OS data in to maps published at the Journal of Maps.

Credit Where Credit’s Due: developing authorship strategies in the geosciences

Thursday, 7 October, 2010

Smith, M.J., Jordan, C. and Walsby, J.
Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association


As research institutions seek to professionalise the workplace the use of metrics to assess an individual’s performance is becoming increasingly commonplace. For academic researchers this can be achieved through the use of publication metrics such as the number of articles published and number of citations. For non-academic professionals, such as cartographers, field assistants or database programmers, they may have limited inclusion as authors and therefore their contribution to research outputs and outcomes is more difficult to ascertain. This paper outlines the current de facto standards for authorship and proposes some potential solutions for the formal recognition of contributions by professionals to research projects. This is presented through strategies currently being trialed at the Journal of Maps and through the example of map publication at the British Geological Survey.

Google Earth Imagery Updates

Tuesday, 5 October, 2010

The Google Earth blog is one well worth monitoring for useful titbits. This recent post explains how often imagery is updated. This is a crucial point as it is not always obvious what the currency is and how the “patch work” of dates varies. They note a policy of trying to keep all imagery less than 3 years old, although this isn’t always possible. Don’t forget that they store (historic) archive imagery and also provide a KML file showing where the updates are. Useful stuff.

Palaeoglaciology of the Last Irish Ice Sheet Reconstructed from Striae Evidence

Wednesday, 29 September, 2010

Smith, M.J. and Knight, J.(in press)
Quaternary Science Reviews


A database comprising some ~5200 individual striation measurements on bedrock surfaces across the island of Ireland was used to produce maps of flowsets corresponding to individual ice flow events during the last (late Devensian) glacial cycle. These flowsets were identified on the basis of regional-scale correspondence between striae orientations which, when linked together spatially, are able to identify consistent ice flow vectors. Four main chronological stages are identified on the basis of this evidence: (i) incursion of Scottish ice into Ireland; (ii) glacial maximum conditions; (iii) ice retreat and dissolution; and (iv) development of localised ice domes. Striae-based reconstructions of the glaciology of the last Irish ice sheet are qualitatively different from those based on bedform (mainly drumlin and ribbed moraine) evidence. Significant differences are apparent in upland areas which have fewer preserved bedforms and a higher concentration of striae. Combining bedform and striae datasets will enable a better understanding of the temporal evolution of the ice sheet. It is likely that both datasets record a snapshot of ice flow direction and subglacial conditions and environments immediately prior to preservation of this directional evidence.

CSVed

Tuesday, 28 September, 2010

I’ve blogged a couple of times about the utility of CSVs as a file format for the distribution of data. They are horribly inefficient, but incredibly simple and widely supported. For that reason they are good for distributing data and forever crop up on Wikileaks and Free Our Data. Excel usually grabs CSV as an extension, but its quite often easier to have something that’s designed for the job and CSVed does this admirably. You get a spreadsheet like view that allows in-cell editing, but its the many other touches that are nice. Drag-and-drop rows and columns, append files, change delimiters, split columns, prefix/suffix, filtering, sorting. The list is quite long and targeted at these dealing with large scale manipulation of CSVs.

CSVed comes highly recommended, but, like Excel there is the odd glitch. Its only with Excel 2010 that some of the file constraints are easing, but upto this point you are pretty much limited to 256 columns and 64,000 rows. I often end up with more than 256 columns when dealing with spectral data from a spectroradiometer (usually well over a thousand). Unfortunately CSVed hangs when trying to load these and Excel won’t load them, which usually leaves me using R to load the data and then transposing the file for further manipulation.

SSTL Developing Three new satellites

Tuesday, 28 September, 2010

SSTL have just announced the development of three new satellites in a £100M investment. What’s interesting with this announcement is that it’s a partnership between SSTL and its data processing subsidiary DMCii and will be operated commercially, leasing time on the satellites to nations that would otherwise not be able to afford their own satellite.

TLS to 3D shapefiles

Monday, 20 September, 2010

We have taken delivery of a new GeoWall system at Kingston which Ken has been painstakingly putting together. It does just look like a very large Meccano set. Anyway, we have been thinking about some 3D datasets to show, initially through ArcScene. Given we have a Leica ScanStation 2 (although I might take issue with it being “affordable” and “entry-level”!), we thought it would be good to show-off some of our laser scan data and, initially, one of the campus buildings.

This data is scanned and stored in Cyclone. Cyclone’s earlier iterations were more closely aligned with CAD, as users were initially producing 3D models of existing infrastructure. The data itself is simple; x,y,z triples of position, but millions of them. Whilst the LAS format is common for the transfer of airborne LiDAR data, the shapefile is a convenient storage format and understood by just about anything. In ArcScene its then simply a case of changing the base heights to the elevation field and its done. Simple. Except Cyclone only exports as a textfile file; no problem, ArcMap can probably handle it. And I’m sure it probably can, except I gave up trying to work out exactly which ToolBox tool is required and, if its not comma or tab separated, how it should imported and whether a schema ini file is needed. I fired up Global Mapper instead which just has a text import filter and a shapefile export filter. Nothing fancy, no drama; it did it. OK, so the 170Mb file took a few minutes to process (on my slow machine!), but it didn’t hang, crash, give an unintelligible error message or anything else. It loaded in to ArcScene fine. Sometimes its nice just to have something that’s straightforward (and it would help if Leica could take the shapefile exporter from LPS and stick it in Cyclone. Different heritage and development teams so I don’t expect it to happen!).

DEMView: 3-D Visualization of DEM Error

Monday, 20 September, 2010

M.B. Gousie and M.J. SmithProceedings of Spatial Accuracy Assessment in Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, Leicester
It is well known that a digital elevation model (DEM) may contain systematic or other errors. In many 3-D visualization systems, problems in the data may be highlighted, but it is often difficult for the viewer to discern the exact nature of the problem. We present DEMView, a viewing and error assessment system specifically for use with DEMs. The system displays a DEM in 3-D with the usual translation, rotation, and zooming tools. However, the system incorporates a suite of visual (qualitative) and statistical (quantitative) assessment tools that help a researcher determine and analyze errors and uncertainty in a given DEM. A case study shows the efficacy of the system.

Mapping European Stereotypes

Monday, 20 September, 2010

Something in this for everyone:

http://alphadesigner.com/project-mapping-stereotypes.html

Funny.

Photogrammetric Week

Saturday, 11 September, 2010

Photogrammetric Week has a long and enviable record as a high profile, quality, conference. In fact, amazingly for a “conference”, it held its 100th Anniversary last year. And whilst it obviously focuses upon photogrammetry, there are many talks devoted to related topics (LiDAR, IfSAR etc). And, somewhat like RSPSoc Annual Conference they publish a set of extended abstracts which are really very useful. If you’ve missed these then the entire back catalogue is available. This is a fantastic resource and, being open access, means they are index by Google as well. RSPSoc need to take a leaf out of PW’s book and do the same, otherwise they will languish on a dusty shelf.

Yes another story about OS monopoly

Wednesday, 8 September, 2010

This time though its the Monopoly boardgame and OS have created a modern map showing the locations of monopoly squares in London. The end result is a fun piece of work, even if it’s not a staggering piece of cartography. Shame its only available as a low-res GIF (unless Ive missed something) because you can’t read much. Not sure why it hasn’t been created as either a high-res raster or vectorised PDF give that VectorMap is available as part of OpenData. And of course it’s not as simple as you might expect; besides some of the locations being area based (e.g. Mayfair), others represent quite long roads. And we now have a location for the mythical “Go” square. That’s not to stop people griping that the “Go” square is wrong or that some of the other locations are inaccurately placed.

Department for Education puts in searing cuts

Saturday, 4 September, 2010

Had a meeting at the Department for Education last week. From all the press I know that cuts have been hard in government, but I hadn’t expected education to be fully bearing the brunt of them.



Michael Gove’s office is top left.

Camp Stansted

Wednesday, 1 September, 2010

I left for RSPSoc 2010 yesterday. Flights from Stansted, Heathrow and Gatwick all go in to Cork, but I reckoned that Stansted was easiest and caught the airport bus up late last night. Its a 6.20am flight so decided in the end that the best bet was to stay at the terminal. A quick butchers at Sleeping in Airports suggested Stansted was extremely budget traveller friendly. And so it was. There are a limited number of seats to lie across and, in any case, in order to get a good nights sleep, you need to take a sleeping bag and Therm-a-rest. It was surprisingly quiet, although the usual odd tannoy announcement, rumble of trolleys and espresso machines. Well recommended for an early start at Stansted!

Alsat-1 decommissioned

Monday, 30 August, 2010

A really nice PR blog entry over at SSTL on the decommissioning of Alsat-1, SSTLs first DMC satellite. Its a really nice example of a fit-for-purpose satellite, new low-cost technology and meeting the environmental needs of developing nations. Well worth a read.

Multi-scale analysis of surface roughness

Thursday, 26 August, 2010

Grohmann, C.H., Smith, M.J. and Riccomini, C. (in press)
IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing


Surface roughness is an important geomorphological variable which has been used in the earth and planetary sciences to infer material properties, current/past processes and the time elapsed since formation. No single definition exists, however within the context of geomorphometry we use surface roughness as a expression of the variability of a topographic surface at a given scale, where the scale of analysis is determined by the size of the landforms or geomorphic features of interest. Six techniques for the calculation of surface roughness were selected for an assessment of the parameter’s behaviour at different spatial scales and dataset resolutions. Area ratio operated independently of scale, providing consistent results across spatial resolutions. Vector dispersion produced results with increasing roughness and homogenisation of terrain at coarser resolutions and larger window sizes. Standard deviation of residual topography highlighted local features and doesn’t detect regional relief. Standard deviation of elevation correctly identified breaks-of-slope and was good at detecting regional relief. Standard deviation of slope (SDslope) also correctly identified smooth sloping areas and breaks-of-slope, providing the best results for geomorphological analysis. Standard deviation of profile curvature identified the breaks-of-slope, although not as strongly as SDslope and it is sensitive to noise and spurious data. In general, SDslope offered good performance at a variety of scales, whilst the simplicity of calculation is perhaps its single greatest benefit.

AeroPress Coffee Maker

Wednesday, 25 August, 2010

Came across the AeroPress coffee maker recently (thanks bro). Looks a very interesting take on coffee making by using a mix of a filter and plunger. However the plunger is an air plunger to create even pressure as the brewed coffee passes through the filter paper. Supposedly to create a smooth filtered taste, but with greater flavour. And, to boot, its portable.