Intergraph® and DigitalGlobe Announce Geospatial Challenge 2012 Winners

Projects will be Presented at the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) 2012 Annual Conference

Intergraph and DigitalGlobe proudly announce that Priyanka Mehta and Allison Howard are the official winners of the Geospatial Challenge. This contest received more than 115 proposals from individuals with project plans to leverage the power and flexibility of ERDAS IMAGINE® to exploit DigitalGlobe's WorldView-2 imagery.

ERDAS IMAGINE allows users to work with WorldView-2's rich set of spectral information, from an easy-to-use set of pre-defined band combinations for deciding on the best way to display the data, to the flexibility offered by the graphical Model Maker environment for designing and sharing new image analysis algorithms. ERDAS IMAGINE provides advanced image classification algorithms such as Spectral Angle, Spectral Correlation, Subpixel Classification and Object Oriented Image Analysis.

Mehta's winning paper is Urban Temperature Profiling Using WorldView-2 8 Band Imagery and ERDAS IMAGINE. This project sought to classify urban land use and land cover to visualise temperature profiles and heat island effects as functions of urban development. The extra four bands of eight-band imagery from WorldView-2 provide increased opportunities for visualisation and extraction of intricate features present in data.

Howard's winning paper is A Maximum Entropy and Least Cost Path Model of Bearded Capuchin Monkey Movement in Northeastern Brazil Incorporating ERDAS Subpixel Classification Analysis of WorldView-2 Imagery. Howard's work has implications for predicting daily movement patterns of all mobile animals, as high-resolution imagery and subpixel analysis in conjunction with habitat modelling represent significant improvements to previous attempts to link species occurrence or animal behaviour with environmental variables.

"The response to the Geospatial Challenge was absolutely phenomenal, reinforcing that ERDAS IMAGINE is the ideal tool for working with WorldView-2's rich set of spectral information," said Mladen Stojic, Vice President, Geospatial at Intergraph SG&I. "It was exciting to see all the submissions from the very avid community of ERDAS IMAGINE users who truly know how to exploit WorldView-2 imagery."

"This Geospatial Challenge is only scratching the surface regarding what can be done using ERDAS IMAGINE's powerful set of tools and our information rich WorldView-2 data" said Michael Oberg, Technical Product Manager at DigitalGlobe. "We were very pleased with the level of interest in the user community. There was a lot of outstanding work submitted, which definitely made the selection process difficult."

Priyanka Mehta and Allison Howard will present their papers on Thursday, March 22, 2012, at the ASPRS Conference in Sacramento, CA.

The publication of AGI member press releases is a member service. The AGI neither approves or endorses the contents of member's press releases, nor makes any assurance of their factual accuracy.