GLIDER: A comprehensive software tool to visualize, analyze and mine satellite imagery

Main ESIP page >> Summer 09 Meeting Main Page
Sara Graves, Rahul Ramachandran, Todd Berendes, Manil Maskey, C. Chidambram - University of Alabama in Huntsville and Patrick Hogan, Tom Gaskin - NASA/AMES

There is a dearth of software tools that allow users to easily visualize, analyze and mine satellite imagery. The few tools that are available are expensive commercial packages that provide limited functionality. As part of a NASA ACCESS funded project, a software tool named GLIDER is currently being developed to fill this void. GLIDER allows users to visualize and analyze satellite data in its native sensor view. Users can enhance the image by applying different image processing algorithms on the data. GLIDER provides the users with a full suite of pattern recognition and data mining algorithms that can be applied to the satellite imagery. The suite of algorithms includes both supervised and unsupervised classification algorithms. In addition, users can project satellite imagery and analysis/mining results onto a globe for visualization. GLIDER also allows users to add additional layers to the globe along with the projected image. Users can open multiple views within GLIDER to manage, visualize and analyze many data files all at once.

GLIDER is being built using three existing components and they are:

NASA World Wind is a powerful 3D visualization software package for geospatial imagery. World Wind’s 3D virtual globe technology provides a stunning view of the Earth, allowing users to change their viewing perspective in any number of ways (zoom, rotate, etc.). Users can visualize data from NASA data archives as well as user-hosted imagery using OGC standards-based Web Map Services.

The Interactive Visualizer and Image Classifier for Satellites (IVICS) is a visualization and image analysis software system for satellite and other image data. Many different types of satellite can be displayed and analyzed in IVICS. It provides powerful image analysis, enhancement, and display tools. IVICS has a sample selection interface to allow users to identify and label samples from image data for use by different supervised classification methods.

The Algorithm Development and Mining System (ADaM) is an extensive image processing and data mining toolkit. This toolkit contains almost all of the typical image processing and data mining algorithms used by researchers in their analysis as well as numerous data preprocessing algorithms such as feature reduction, subsetting, subsampling, etc.

The latest release of the GLIDER prototype will be demonstrated. In addition, the features that will be available in the future releases will also be presented.