Rapidly Making Colorful Landsat-8 Composite with Free Advanced Image Analysis Tools from GeoSage

Monday, June 17th 2013

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Sydney, Australia - 17 June 2013:

Latest high-quality Landsat-8 satellite imagery freely available from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) provides enormous potential for innovation and applications. There is a great demand for new software tools that can analyze the imagery in a straightforward way.

Currently, while there are many image processing software tools on the market, very few can quickly make beautiful, detail-rich imagery composites with adaptive image stretching and advanced image pan-sharpening. One may spend hours to produce something that ought to be handy in the first place. For many GIS users, it is often hard to find right capable tools (i.e. band combination, image stretching and pan-sharpening) in GIS packages. And for casual users and the general public, dedicated tools to process the vast Landsat imagery archive are lacking.

GeoSage is pleased to release Spectral Transformer tool sets for Landsat-8 imagery to fill in this gap.


The standalone tools are powerful and easy to use, and perform three steps of analyses:

• Step 1: Simple band combination to make three-band imagery composite
• Step 2: Adaptive linear and non-linear image stretching to make colorful imagery composite
• Step 3: Advanced and fast image pan-sharpening to make spatially sharper and colorful composite

The tools specifically target Landsat-8 imagery in GeoTIFF format directly downloaded from the USGS Landsat-8 distribution portals, e.g. GloVis. The processed (stretched and pan-sharpened) imagery at 30m- and 15-mresolution in GeoTIFF format can be readily used in all GIS and mapping platforms (e.g. ArcGIS, MapInfo and Google Earth).

The tools are DOS-based and very productive. The time to process a full Landsat-8 scene on an average computer is only about 1 minute.

The tools are free to use except for large-scale commercial applications. Anyone even with little image processing experience could perform the analysis. It is our hope that more people can take advantage of and benefit from the excellent Landsat-8 imagery.

Seven test scenes for evaluation

Seven recently-acquired Landsat-8 scenes (four from the U.S.) are processed. Truly natural-color, full-scene results (in three GIS-ready formats: JPG/WLD, JPEG2000 and KMZ) can be downloaded and evaluated.

• San Francisco (acquired date: 2013-04-16)
• Los Angeles (acquired date: 2013-05-13)
• New York (acquired date: 2013-06-01)
• Washington D.C. (acquired date: 2013-04-21)
• The Alps, Europe (acquired date: 2013-04-25)
• Shanghai, China (acquired date: 2013-05-25)
• Sydney, Australia (acquired date: 2013-04-27)

Please evaluate the quality of the processed imagery in terms of:

• Spectral consistency / color saturation / color contrast
• Spatial precision / object detail / spatial sharpness / spatial texture

Be the judge on the performance of the tools. It is with great privilege that we all have access to such a superior imagery source. We have tried our best to develop the tools that can preserve that high quality as much as possible.

The software and the test results can be downloaded at http://www.GeoSage.com/ or http://www.SatelliteImagery360.com/


About GeoSage

GeoSage (http://www.GeoSage.com/) is an enthusiastic leading developer in image fusion and spectral transformation analysis. It has developed a few key technologies and software tools able to enhance imagery interpretation and visualisation, and produced some unique, large-sized, global satellite imagery and shaded-relief mosaics. GeoSage offers innovative, advanced and cost-effective image/spatial analysis products and solutions for the growing geospatial community as well as the general public.

source:  http://www.directionsmag.com