Go Tell Someone

Hello Everyone Chief Guss Wright again.

I was recently with some of you in Orlando at the USGIF GEOINT Symposium, and others of you at the Geospatial Planning Cell (GPC) Coproduction Working Group at Fort Leonard Wood. I can attest, NOTHING travels faster than the "word of mouth". Given this fact, I want you to walk away after reading this blog and go tell someone that ENVI has a United States Army – Home Use Program! The software is interoperable with ESRI solutions both on the desktop and in the cloud, and the specialized CADRG/RPF workflow is steadily being improved as we make steps towards automating the entire process for you.

First of all, I’d like to introduce the new Defense Account Manager here at Harris, Jeff Hildebrandt. If you’re an Army DCGS-A user interested in obtaining the latest copy of ENVI and a home use license, then you’ll need to reach out to Jeff @ jeffrey.hildebrandt@harris.com. He’ll vett the request and get you squared away. Taking advantage of this HUP and the ENVI Pocket Guide will have you using ENVI in no time. If you want to meet Jeff, the upcoming ENVI Analytics Symposium (EAS) would be a great time to do so and it’s also an excellent training opportunity.

Earlier in the month Jeff, James Lewis, Kevin Wells and I were invited to the GPC Huddle to present on ENVI’s CADRG Save as functionality in ENVI 5.3.x and also to provide a high level status of the software at large. I’m happy we were afforded this opportunity because it enabled us to clarify the intent of the workflow, which is solely to support systems that cannot read vector data, and it also facilitated a provision of clarity concerning limitations within the CADRG Specification itself which was written in the 1990’s. When performing this workflow it’s essential to understand what’s actually happening to the data. An input image containing 16.7 million colors is being compressed to fit the CADRG SPEC which only allocates 216 colors x 4096 codebook entries in a Look Up Table (LUT). Needless to say, the limitations in this specification requires some expert handling of the data in order to gain the results desired. Worry not! I’m working with the team here at ENVI to develop an automated workflow that will revolutionize this process.

If you would like a copy of the briefing I gave at the GPC Coproduction Working group which outlines the current workflow and the way forward, just reach out. The goal is to incorporate this workflow in ENVI Services Engine along with the other great tools available to you in the Hydra solution.

“What’s Hydra?" you might ask. Hydra is a cloud based Workflow platform that provides you and your end-users a real-time dashboard of tasks such as Helicopter Landing Zones (HLZ) and Line of Sight (LOS) Tactical Decision Aids, to name a couple. Why not automate the CADRG workflow and put it here too. That’s the goal. We want to empower you and your end-users. ENVI’s Hydra solution also provides data discovery and dissemination of these analytics.  If you want to know more just reach out and I’ll put you in contact with the same experts I’m learning all these great techniques from in effort to advance the Army GEOINT Tradecraft. That’s all for now. Guss Wright Out!!!