Paper
28 December 1999 Exploitation of commercial remote sensing images: reality ignored?
Paul C. Allen
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
The remote sensing market is on the verge of being awash in commercial high-resolution images. Market estimates are based on the growing numbers of planned commercial remote sensing electro-optical, radar, and hyperspectral satellites and aircraft. EarthWatch, Space Imaging, SPOT, and RDL among others are all working towards launch and service of one to five meter panchromatic or radar-imaging satellites. Additionally, new advances in digital air surveillance and reconnaissance systems, both manned and unmanned, are also expected to expand the geospatial customer base. Regardless of platform, image type, or location, each system promises images with some combination of increased resolution, greater spectral coverage, reduced turn-around time (request-to- delivery), and/or reduced image cost. For the most part, however, market estimates for these new sources focus on the raw digital images (from collection to the ground station) while ignoring the requirements for a processing and exploitation infrastructure comprised of exploitation tools, exploitation training, library systems, and image management systems. From this it would appear the commercial imaging community has failed to learn the hard lessons of national government experience choosing instead to ignore reality and replicate the bias of collection over processing and exploitation. While this trend may be not impact the small quantity users that exist today it will certainly adversely affect the mid- to large-sized users of the future.
© (1999) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Paul C. Allen "Exploitation of commercial remote sensing images: reality ignored?", Proc. SPIE 3870, Sensors, Systems, and Next-Generation Satellites III, (28 December 1999); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.373221
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KEYWORDS
Remote sensing

Image processing

Image resolution

Buildings

Image analysis

Satellites

Standards development

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