Just an analyst looking at the world

In most cases as a geospatial analyst I use ENVI and IDL to look at the world in a rather flat and two dimensional aspect when it comes to data analytics. However, LiDAR, drones, advancements in photogrammetry, and temporal analytics within ENVI have given me the ability to analyze data in new ways that were previously too time consuming, difficult, or simply not available.  

I can use tools like the photogrammetry suite to create dense point clouds over areas that it would be difficult to attain the same fidelity, or even fly over with airborne platforms. As small satellites come online they will give us coverage and revisit times unlike anything we’ve had before!

What will we do with all that data?  

Utilizing the spatiotemporal tools in ENVI, we can gain information from days, weeks, months, or years’ worth of collects that classic change detection analytics would not support.

    Point cloud drone collect   Temporal analysis            

 

LiDAR data has become more available for analyst, and we need to be able to exploit it beyond looking at a bunch of points. Using the ENVI LiDAR tools, you can quickly and easily build robust elevation models to be used for everthing from creating an ortho-mosaic to a line-of-sight analysis. We can also extract 3D models for modeling and simulation, or building scenes for decsion making.

 

	Collada models from ENVI LiDAR		DSM and building vectors from LiDAR point cloud

 

 

 

 

 

 

I can also take advantage of IDL to build out custom tools that enable me to become a more efficient analyst. For example, I can create a tool to ingest a point cloud that gives me multiple products, where before I would have needed to create them individually. I also won’t have to rewrite my code over again when I’m ready to move to the enterprise thanks to the new ENVI task system.

	Custom tool combing multiple task

 

ENVI is not only allowing analyst to respond to various problem sets more efficiently, but also to ENVI enables analysts to do things that just weren’t possible a few years ago. Though the exploitation and types of data is forever changing at a rapid pace, ENVI is leading the charge to remain an industry standard for analytics.