hariasa

Can you be more specific? Obviously, you need to convert these images into something ERDAS can read (this is done in the SNAP toolbox). Do the images open in ArcGIS or QGIS?

The TWOPAC software by DLR can also classify shapes (both pixel classification in raster and shape classification in a shapefile). It is a QGIS extension, though it is a bit hard to find where to download. There are some publications about this software, and maybe you can ask the authors if they have a link to download, since it is open source software. hXXps://www.researchgate.net/publication/225020547_TWOPAC_-_A_new_approach_for_automated_classification_of_satellite_imagery

I know that with eCognition you can do such a thing from a raster (raster shapes, make polygons, classify polygons based on many different attributes), you probably could do it with a shapefile too, not sure though. A free alternative of eCognition is Orfeo, but I do not know if you can use that to do what you want.

ESRI is just a greedy corporation that wants to monopolize the sector with stupid proprietary formats, incompatibility with open standards and crappy software. They buy companies, and if that isn't possible, make their own mediocre product which everyone will use because it is integrated and because of name building. They don't care about the consumer. They don't care about GIS. All they care is cold hard cash. They are just a bunch of Ferengi. But not only ESRI is like this, also ERDAS, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung.... It's just how the world is.

I have tried this with GM 15, and it downloads the data, but it only creates blank rasters

Hi, I want to convert data from a WMS (all aerial photos) to offline rasters. Is this possible? Sure you can load WMS directly in your GIS application, but this is not suitable for an internet connection as slow as mine. Programming examples would be very helpful. Thanks

This solution does not work. I have added the registry key with the Chinese Simplified codepage (936), and when saving the shapefile after editing all chinese characters revert to gobbledygook. Step 1: Did not work for me, same issues as above, all characters after editing revert to nonsense. Step 2: Sounds interesting! Hopefully it will get back to you because this issue is really annoying. Why doesn't ArcGIS simply accept CPG files??? Thanks for helping though, if you or anyone else has more ideas, let me know P.S.: by the way, to translate a DBF from a shapefile more efficiently, open in OpenOffice, select appropriate Codepage, Save as XLS format, upload to Google Documents, make a new column in Google spreadsheets, apply a formula such as =GoogleTranslate(<cell-to-be-translated>,"de","en") and drag down, download as XLS format, save as DBF format replacing your existing DBF file. Note that the column name should be of the same format as the other column names or it won't work! (Do this with open office because Excel does not allow codepages to be set). Long procedure, but if you have like 50.000 entries it's much faster than translating every single one of them manually...

I have a shapefile with Chinese characters in it. When I edit the shapefile and put an english translation, the chinese characters dissappear because of the encoding my system uses. I could change the system locale, but this is to me a last resort. Is there a way to force ArcGIS to read things in a certain encoding? (for example messing with the DBF header?) QGIS demonstrates how it is done; it just accepts CPG files. Thanks!

Really sad. Landsat 5 was a great satellite. Hopefully Landsat 8 will have a long and productive life

Copy cloud services now has a special free give away for online storage. You get 15 GB for free, + 5GB for each referral. What makes Copy different from most other cloud services (such as Skydrive and Dropbox) is that it has no limitation on file size. So perhaps it is interesting for remote sensing purposes/syncing of smaller projects, since those images can sometimes be too large to be accepted by other services. Also the pricing is attractive, if you are into that (group users etc.) See the link below: https://copy.com?r=AMB6mp

Hi all, I was just wondering if someone has used WEKA (or RapidMiner) to classify RS data. Searching on the internet revealed some papers about people using it, but with only for very small areas. Does anyone have experience with large amounts of data to classify with either of these programs? Since it seems kind of impossible to convert a large multi-band raster to the silly CSV/ARFF format WEKA uses. Thanks

Since I wasn't that familiar with ENVI (actually studying it for my project) I found that FME was the easiest to configure.

Hi all, I have a lot of rasters of the same size, location, projection, file type etc. that I need to stack. Ordinarily I would do this with the Stack Layer option in ERDAS, but now I have to do it a whopping 60 times * 9 bands. There must be a better way to do this, so I thought of FME. But FME with the rasterbandcombiner baffles me. I insert 9 rasters in there and I get 9 rasters back, although I wanted 1 raster with 9 bands back instead. I know you can do it in ArcGIS too, but my classifier (Randomforest in R) does not take kindly to rasters that are created with ArcGIS (no matter what format). Does anyone know how to stack these rasters together in a more automated fashion (in another program or using the rasterbandcombiner in FME)? Also, the rasters are not necessarily all the same bit range (8-bit etc.) and not necessarily of the same spatial resolution. Much thanks! I already found the solution, you are supposed to use the sort. FME can only stack similar bands, not like ERDAS stack anything you like. If someone has an automated solution for that last bit, that would be great. Thanks all.

I really don't like the ERDAS vegetation index calculator thingy. So what I did instead is program a python script to calculate all the indices i need automatically from multiband optical imagery.

Eventually, I performed the RandomForest method with R. It was quite easy to program, with the help of a few tutorials on the R help. I have not tried EnMAP yet, I will do so now and post here how it went. Having a lot of variables in R with very big imagery does not always go well... sometimes randomforest in R 'forgets' to classify certain things the first time. It's also quite RAM intensive, so if anyone else wants to do it, you need at least 4 GB of RAM to do a decent random forest classification with R for a decent image. Thanks nomlas for your help! +1

Apple today released new Macbook Pros, a new Mac Pro, Macbook Airs and their new Mountain Lion OS and iOS 6. The most GIS related announcement is that Apple released their own propriety maps solution with built in Turn based navigation, 3D flyover and traffic solutions. With the release of retina display Macbook Pros, hopefully there will be a proper GIS and RS app for the Mac (Although ENVI is available already). Nows the time. I don't see why companies shouldn't develop one, except ESRI of course since they are Microsoft in disguise (see my previous post).

Hi, Does anyone know how to perform a RandomForest classification? Or which programs support it? Are there example scripts for R? Or plugins for ERDAS, ENVI or something? I use shapefiles for training areas and tif files for the actual data to be classified. All help would be awesome. Thanks, -hariasa

It's becoming off topic. I couldn't agree more. Contribution to the developers is good. However, with commercial companies, do you actually contribute to the actual developer or just to the bosses car/house/jetplane? And if you have a one person company making your living project-per-project, is it then fair to pay a huge amount of your income on too expensive software that does not work half the time? That's the actual question. Big commercial companies should make affordable software, for students, researchers and small companies/counties so everyone can use their products.

I am so, so, so annoyed that all the universities in my country doing something GIS related immediately get the ESRI stamp. Do something with GIS? Here is ArcGIS. Want to do something with Remote Sensing? There you go, ERDAS. I had to learn all the other GIS and RS software by myself in my internships or research projects. About the certificate, I never heard of such a thing in my country. Then again GIS professionals are very, very rare here and the community is so, so small that contacts are everything. Do a good job in university, and you get a good job later because everyone knows about it. Get bad grades at the university, and quite soon everyone knows they should not hire you. It's not necessarily a good way to get a job, but it works (as long as you start doing your best even in university). Though granted this situation is probably more applicable to the 'just graduated from university' situation. I guess I will see in coming years how hard or easy it is to get a job.

Person A: We need more money. Think of something!!! Person B: mmmm.... what about making very crap software that everyone thinks they need and make it really, really expensive Person A: We got that, and there is even a yearly update cycle and maintenance fees that cost a lot of money. We also let some universities let their students learn it so they don't know how to work with anything else. We need more! Person B: Oh I got it, lets make a certificate that nobody really needs, doesn't really mean much but they have to renew it every 6 months? Person A: Awesome! For now, anyways.

It's released now. http://www.playmapscube.com/ And what it is: an awkward game that should be so much nicer on a tablet, not a computer, and it's basically an advertorial, not a game.

The Cloud service Dropbox, which enables you to sync and share folders and files with others, has got a lot of competition this week. - Google Drive has been opened for the public, giving 5 GB of space, although this is shared with what you have already saved on your google acount (such as GMail). - Microsoft Skydrive got an overhaul today, giving 7 GB of free space. However, if you have used Skydrive before April 22, they give you a free bump to 25 GB! You have to login to Skydrive to claim your free space quickly though. All these cloud services enable you to also share folders and files, collaborate with documents and sync folders and files to iOS, Windows, Mac OSX and Android. They also have pricing plans for heavy users. https://drive.google.com/start#home https://skydrive.live.com/ What's your favorite cloud service?

Sure. 1: Make sure you have several ground control points (5 per image, distributed around the picture, ought to do it although if you have very hilly terrain then you should use more...) with XY (use an ortho image) and Z (use an existing DEM) (alternatively you can go out in the field and measure it yourself) where the ground control points are on ground level (i.e. a road intersection, not a building). 2: Use LPS in ERDAS to load the stereo imagery in and then ground reference away. 3: Automatically generate tiepoints and check up on RMSE values (that they are not too high, otherwise you will have verify that the ground control points are on the correct location) 4: After this, you can generate a DSM and adjust it with the eATA or aATA software to filter, adjust and view the points in ERDAS. These points can then be exported to a contour, TIN or Raster. Good luck!

You can create a DSM (Digital Surface Model) using stereo WorldView-2 Images in programs such as LPS (in ERDAS). The procedure is quite easy (place a handful of ground control points, GCP's distributed over the image, where you rectify it with either manually measured points or an pre-existing DTM and Ortho image), however it takes some manual labour and it could take long if you have many images/big area. Afterwards you can attempt to create a DTM (Digital Terrain Model) using the eATA software which then filters out points depending on their classification. There are many options involved in eATA which you can all find in the very useful helpfile. In my experience however it needs a lot of manual correcting (AND processing power!). ... I think you can also use point cloud classifiers/filter algorithms to generate a DTM and Normalized Heights... but I am too busy to experiment with that. Usually you create a DSM from these images in order to produce Ortho's (the stuff you have) unless there is a better one available. Hence you can't really create a DEM from Ortho's since they are already corrected.

Apparently, Windows 8 RC usage really catches on; it has twice the amount of Windows 7 users in the same time period. Still don't really understand why. Source: Microsoft Twitter http://twitter.com/#!/BuildWindows8/status/193383361337753601