Best Practices for Mission Applications

New Dimensions with Oblique Aerial Imagery for US Marine Corps

—Frances Railey, USMC GeoFidelis

The GeoFidelis Program has acquired SmartView™ Oblique aerial view (OAV) imagery for over 600 square miles of Marine Corps installations along the Atlantic coast, including Quantico, Camp Lejeune, Parris and Blount Islands. These high resolution full color aerial imagery sets provide GeoFidelis stakeholders with analysis & visualization capabilities for accomplishing asset management, homeland security, public safety/E911, environmental, and anti-terrorism missions on USMC installations. USMC personnel exploit the OAV imagery on a freely-distributed visualization tool set which includes the SmartView Desktop based on the NASA World Wind open source SDK—as well as a free ArcGIS extension. Smartview Desktop quickly and easily displays analyzes and manages these imagery datasets alone or in conjunction with other geographic data sources. MC users can measure vertical and horizontal objects from various angles and directions, annotate, create visual products, export to ArcGIS, save and/or print image files for their daily responsibilities with minimal training or instruction. Smartview Desktop can also be used in conjunction with the SmartView ArcGIS™ Extension for a synchronized view of the imagery dataset in both the SmartView fully interactive 3D globe and the powerful ESRI® GIS environment.