pixelcooker

ArcGIS and QGIS are two giants of GIS Software in the modern era. Both of them are used by most of GIS experts around the world. They come with similar features but still there are some distinction about their capabilities. Take the Geospatial data format as the reference, ArcGIS has its own native geospatial data format called file geodatabase. File geodatabase is such a complete format that it is not only capable to store vector data, but it also can store raster data, topology, relationship table, geoprocessing tools, domain reference, custom coordinate system, you name it.  And now about QGIS, it is still a young player in GIS although it is been developed by Open Source Communities for more than 20 years. QGIS born as lightweight GIS software with very limited capabilities, but few years later, it is growth into a giant with a wide range capabilities to tackle complex GIS processing ranging from spatial analysis, database management, to raster simulation. Even there are some f...

Current imaging technologies are so advanced that photography today is not only about the photo result, but also many additional properties, include the photo location. Embedding location is very common today because almost all imaging enabled devices (smartphone, notebook, tablet, GPS handheld, etc) as abilities to store GPS coordinates into the EXIF metadata inside a photo. Online services like FLICKR or Google Maps also provide ability to host a collection of photos/images that also can display the photos based on its coordinates into an online maps.  Now for GIS users, does the display photos or images based on its location into a GIS software?. The answer is yes you absolutely can. You can do this kind of visualization almost in every GIS software available on the market. ArcGIS and QGIS absolutely can do this. Now if you are interested to do this in GIS environment, I have created a video tutorial about how to do it in ArcGIS below. 

When I first made this blog, I wrote few articles about Panchromatic Sharpening (Pan Sharpening). This article is also can be considered as one of them. In this article, I will share about Gram-Schmidt Pan Sharpening Method. Since a few years ago, Gram Schmidt Pan Sharpening Algorithm has been implemented in ENVI Software, and it becomes one of the best Pan Sharpening methods that could not only preserve spatial details of the Panchromatic band but also maintain the spectral fidelity of multispectral bands.  The goodness is, this algorithm now is also has been implemented in ArcGIS. So finally we can perform a decent Pan Sharpening operation in GIS Software. This will reduce multiple software operations when we need pan-sharpened data. So finally it would be more effective for us, GIS analyst. I won't explain the technical aspect of the algorithm because there are many articles on the internet that already talks about it. I only want to share how to perform pan sharpening using Gra...