“Kataloging” Imagery

In just a few weeks San Francisco will once again play host to the largest geophysical conference in the country.  AGU is an amazing event held at the Moscone Center in the heart of San Francisco every December.  Upwards of 20,000 people gather to present, network, and learn.  This year I will be presenting a poster on a software program for cataloging imagery. Remote sensing users face the challenge of managing hundreds, even thousands of scenes. These images are normally stored as files organized in a folder structure. Unless there are clearly defined rules about the organization of the directories and file naming conventions, users inevitably find it very difficult to find particular images. “Katalog” is a free satellite image cataloguing tool developed to solve this problem. It can crawl a particular folder structure in search of the satellite images, extracting both metadata, footprints, and thumbnails. This information is then searchable by a number of variables (e.g. name, sensor, geographic location, date, description, and so on) allowing users to quickly find scenes in their imagery libraries, discovering and rediscovering data they didn’t even know they had. “Katalog” works as an extension to the ENVI software package, taking advantage of the large collection of satellite image readers that ENVI provides. Generated thumbnails and footprints are also compatible with other applications like Google Earth, Picasa, and Esri ArcGIS. If you are attending AGU and have time to visit the poster sessions on Tuesday December 4^th in the afternoon, please stop by to chat about this ENVI plugin.  The Exelis VIS team will also have a booth on the Tradeshow floor if you miss the poster session.