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LEICA GEOSYSTEMS ERDAS IMAGINE TO SUPPORT 10G SPATIAL GeoRaster

This week at ISPRS, Leica Geosystems GIS & Mapping LLC will demonstrate ERDAS IMAGINE, the industry's premier geographic imaging suite, access to raster data stored and managed in Oracle Database 10g.

Leica Geosystems and Oracle Corp have partnered to bring to the market, for the first time, imaging tools that address multiple terabytes (approaching petabytes) of remote sensing, photogrammetry and satellite imagery as a single logical dataset in an open, enterprise system.

Oracle Database 10g is the industry's first database designed for Grid computing. It includes the new GeoRaster feature in Oracle 10g Spatial that allows vector data, georeferenced raster imagery and Gridded data to be stored, indexed, queried and analyzed in the same system. When imagery is stored in GeoRaster, users can find a location on the earth's surface or in a local coordinate system for each cell in a raster. Additionally, given a location on the earth, they can find the cell in a raster layer associated with that location. Support for Oracle 10g Spatial and GeoRaster will be a standard feature in all Leica Geosystems image processing products, including future releases of ERDAS IMAGINE and Leica Photogrammetry Suite (LPS).

With the explosive growth in the collection and analysis of remote sensing and satellite imagery, and the dramatic improvements in high-resolution data capture, both companies recognize that multi-petabyte image archives will become increasingly common. Using GeoRaster, Leica Geosystems products will be able to perform operations on single images of up to .5TB in archives spanning petabytes of vector and raster data.

"This technology raises the bar to a completely new level for applications that depend on georeferenced raster data," said Dennis Sandin, senior vice president and digital mapping principal at Bohannan Huston, a leader in surveying, mapping, imaging and GIS services. "With new remote sensing, photogrammetric and satellite imaging technologies, we're seeing terabytes of data collected in a matter of days. The market has been waiting for a solution like this."

The extension of ERDAS IMAGINE and LPS will allow product users within a large organization to share imagery across the entire organization, avoiding the management and maintenance difficulties associated with traditional shared file systems. ERDAS IMAGINE and LPS will both directly access database imagery without the need of special importers. Both products will be able to place data directly into the database and it will be possible to use imagery within the database as easily as imagery in IMG, TIFF or JPG formats.

"The combination of Leica Geosystems and Oracle technologies addresses a need in government and large-scale enterprise applications where customers require security, scalability and performance in a consolidated, integrated archive," said Jim Steiner, senior director of Spatial Products for Oracle Server Technologies.

"Oracle provides the premier enterprise IT system worldwide and Leica Geosystems offers the best raster-based imaging software available today," said Martin Tremp, vice president of business development for Leica Geosystems GIS & Mapping. "It made sense to combine the strengths of two world-renown technology companies to bring customers a comprehensive IT package that supports imaging applications."