Spaced Out :: 2009

Lidar news have a nice article on low cost 2D LiDAR. Well worth looking at the OXTS webpage and related videos. This clearly demonstrates how young the mobile LiDAR (and for that matter static LiDAR) area is so expect to see big strides to making it more cost effective.

Slashdot reported earlier this year on the FOSS4G web server benchmarking. The big news was that ESRI were taking part, but then pulled out. The hope was to get both ESRI and MapGuide in to the frame to see how they did. With the recently announced ERDAS 2010 released, Chris Tweedie over at ERDAS took it upon himself to run some benchmarks (also reported in Slashdot). The results certainly look impressive (up to twice as fast as Mapserver) which I guess is why they were happy to put the product forward. ESRIs silence is deafening….

Slashgeo report on the availability of 22m multispectral data from DMC via the UK-DMC2 and Deimos-1 satellites. Good to see this constellation is proving successful and improving; a great advert for the new British Space Agency!

I recently came across LeoWorks an educational remote sensing package that is free for use in teaching. Developed by ESA and the Romanian Space Agency (yes they have one and obviously for a considerably longer time than the UK!) its not going to win any cutting edge awards but it is a very capable piece of software. It surprises me that there are no reasonable open source remote sensing packages (unlike GIS), but there you go….. anyway, it appears to be developed in IDL (which would make sense) and offers the following features (amongst many):

-image information/historgram
-split, combine, rotate, mirror, raster math
-stretching, histogram equalization
-convolution filtering
-supervised/unsupervised classification
-PCA
-georeferencing
-NDVI
-scatter plots

As you can see, surprisingly capable and certainly pretty much everything you would want to cover in an introductory module. And, to boot, it appears to run fine from a USB stick.

I’m sure this is a result of “middle age grouch” syndrome hitting me, but the whole “Christmas thing” seems to get bigger, earlier and glitzier each year. How refreshing to see this petition to number 10. Shame its lapsed as I would have voted!!!!