Georeference is a company which provides GIS and digital cartographic services. For their GIS work, they have chosen to use ArcInfo software. In addition, Georeference has knowledge experience in image processing and photointerpretation and of aerial photos, for which they usually use other specialized software.
Georeference has had several observations in the fields of GIS and image processing as a result of the expertise in these two areas:
(a) There is an obvious complementarity between the geographic information that can be extracted from raster images and the vector typically used in a GIS.
(b) The information extraction techniques applied to an image involve basic knowledge of remote sensing (e.g. physics and mathematics) and involve experience with software packages rarely used by GIS users.
(c) Superimposed layers in a GIS must necessarily be in a vector format. Raster data must be vectorized to be imported and exploited in a GIS.
Today, a GIS such as ArcInfo can read raster data such as SPOT data in the SPOTView format. Despite this capability, the GIS user is not always able to profit from the information contained in the imagery. The solution would be to use image processing techniques and tools but these tools are not present in ArcInfo. To address this lack of simple interaction between the GIS and image processing, Georeference created the "Image Interpretor" using the ArcInfo GRID module. This application was the result of the "SPOT and GIS applications" contest sponsored by SPOT IMAGE and Esri. This contest involved many skills within the company and it represents the synthesis of the work and the acquired photointerpretation and thematic analysis knowledge of our data processing development team.
Hubert Dehaese**
Georeference
10, avenue de l'Europe
31525 Ramonville-St. Agne
France
Telephone: 33-61-28-56-33
Fax: 33-61-28-56-00