Wednesday, October 3, 2012

PCI Geomatics releases Geomatica 2013

RICHMOND HILL, Ontario, Canada—October 3, 2012: PCI Geomatics, a world leading developer of geo-imaging software and systems, today announces the release of Geomatica 2013; the latest version of the company’s complete and integrated desktop image processing software featuring tools for remote sensing, digital photogrammetry, geospatial analysis, map production, mosaicking and more.

“With this year’s release, we have really added tools that will speed up the processing workflow in many different areas of the software,” said Peter Hazlett, Product Manager for Geomatica. “It is not uncommon for projects of hundreds to thousands of images in size that need to be processed in a single block. New tools have been added and performance has been improved for compute intensive algorithms, saving you hours in processing time.”

Geomatica 2013 adds incredible performance improvements to streamline your workflow like never before. Starting with Focus, new, wizard based workflows have been added for Atmospheric Correction that will allow users to automatically detect cloud and haze in imagery – which will make producing seamless mosaics in cloud plagued areas more intuitive. In OrthoEngine, users will see incredible improvements in handling large projects, including Quality Assurance panels that automatically update, Ground Control Point (and Tie Point) visualization, leading edge automated seamline generation, and the best algorithms to match images to each other automatically through new automatic ground control collection algorithms that can achieve registration accuracies down to 1/10th of a pixel!

Included in the Geomatica 2013 release is a set of new, redesigned algorithms to automatically extract Digital Elevation Models from single or up to hundreds of stereo pairs collected by high resolution sensors. In addition, creating DEMs from multi-source elevation data (billions of lidar points, contour lines, breaklines) is now possible through powerful new tools for DEM creation from vector data. All DEM generation algorithms have been implemented to leverage OpenMP, which means customers will see big performance improvements (3x to 4x faster than previous).

In addition to the great new and improved tools, Geomatica 2013 will also offer a unique, new tool to help customers improve the way they work with their large, complex data holdings. Geomatica Discover, which will be available in a Geomatica 2013 service pack, is a standalone, web based data discovery tool, will crawl your local or system drives to automatically create footprints for geospatial raster and vector data. The interface allows for map based or advanced text based querying, allowing customers to quickly and efficiently discover their data holdings to help organize production work.

Geomatica 2013 is available for 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows (Windows XP/Windows 7/Server 2003/Server 2008) starting today. A Linux version will be available in the coming weeks. For more information on Geomatica 2013, please visit www.pcigeomatics.com/geomatica. 



About PCI Geomatics
PCI Geomatics is a world-leading developer of software and systems to process aerial and satellite imagery. The company provides integrated Esri imagery workflows, standalone image processing capability, and large volume processing throughput, giving customers the ability to produce high-quality image products and derived information for any project. Find out more at www.pcigeomatics.com/geomatica

Press Contact
Kevin R. Jones
Director, Marketing and Communications
T: 819-770-0022 x 214
E:
jones@pcigeomatics.com
Web:
www.pcigeomatics.com
Twitter: @pcigeomatics


Highlights in Geomatica 2013

Atmopheric Correction
Industry leading Atmospheric Correction Tools, with an all new wizard interface including workflows for:
  • Haze detection and removal
  • Cloud detection and masking
  • Ground reflectance map generation
  • Surface temperature mapping


Digital Elevation Model (DEM) Extraction
·         3x to 4x better performance (OpenMP enabled)
·         Higher accuracy, better results
o    New filtering, terrain selection options
o    Better handling of large elevation jumps
·         Productivity improvements
o    New simplified workflow in OrthoEngine
o    Automatically work with 100’s to 1,000s of stereo pairs
·         Dramatic improvements in generating DEMs from vector data (billions of Lidar points, breakline, contour lines)

Speedy Workflows
OrthoEngine includes key improvements that will improve productivity:
·         More control over large projects
·         Faster, more efficient QA
·         Easier point selection / deletion / editing
·         Improved seamline generation methods (fewer vertices per line)
·         2D DEM editing capability in Focus to quickly address quality issues with DEMs


Format/Sensor Support
PCI Geomatics is proud to be consistently first-to-market with new format and sensor support.  In Geomatica 2013, adds support for the following:

New Sensors
Pleiades
UAVSAR
Sentinel-1


Updates to existing Sensors
·         Deimos
·         ZY3
·         CBERS02C

New Formats
Along with new formats, Geomatica 2013 includes multi-sensor metadata collection capability which has been redesigned, with the emphasis on simplifying workflows down the road since many parameters are automatically populated. New data formats include:
  • Esri Arc Geodatabase Vector Support
  • Panorama SXF
  • Envi (improvements in handling of format)
  • Pyramid file support for ENVI and Erdas image formats



Data Visualization
  • FLY! Has received improvements, including upgrading it to be OpenMP enabled, improving performance up to 4x
  • Focus includes improve mulit-layer selection capability, as well as setting and changing the default band combination for multiple images at once
  • Ability to generate a Spot blue band (to make natural color composites)
  • Profile tool improvements for displaying multiple channels at once

SAR Improvements
PCI has a long and rich tradition of developing tools for SAR Sensors. Geomatica 2013 includes the following improvements:
·         Improved performance for SAR algorithms (OpenMP implementation)
·         Automatic water body delineation based on new methods developed at CCRS
·         Improved  user interaction capability for SPW (editable text, 2D, 3D, Static output)
·         Intuitive processing (workflow based on available data and parameters)