Portable Google Earth - When wires and radios fail

Written by Kevin P. Corble

 GIF 2009 Volume: 7 Issue: 5 (October)

 

Industry Seeks New Ways To Deliver Imagery
And Derived Products More Efficiently To
Commanders In The Field Or Wherever
Geospatial Information Is Most Needed.

The U.S. defense/intelligence community has a seemingly insatiable appetite for commercial satellite imagery. The unclassified nature of images from private-sector remote sensing operators makes these products appealing to the military because they can be quickly transmitted between commands and freely shared among allied forces without the time-consuming clearances required for distribution of classified images.

While purchases by the Pentagon have been a boon to commercial satellite operators, these firms face the added challenge of staying ahead of the evolving needs of military end-users. In recent years, this has meant supporting the Department of Defense in finding new ways to deliver imagery and derived products more efficiently to commanders in the field or wherever the geospatial information is needed the most.

PORTABLE GOOGLE EARTH

The defense/intelligence community has embraced the Google Earth environment as one in which geospatial users with little or no formal training are comfortable viewing and accessing geographic information. The Google Earth Enterprise product enables customers such as NGA to build Web-accessible Google Earth Globes populated with their own data sets. In the military setting, this allows commanders to drill down through multiple levels of satellite and aerial imagery, as well as vector and video data, to gain 2-D or 3-D insights into nearly any area of interest on Earth.

Google and Spot Image teamed in 2008 to develop a portable and deployable version of Google Earth Globe for warfighters to take imagery with them on laptop computers or external drives where no Internet is available. Google Earth Enterprise Portable offers all of the same viewing and processing features as the larger product, but it is designed for use with smaller slices of the Globe, such as a single country or geographic region.

“The main advantage is that you now have imagery in the field in a completely disconnected version of the same, easy-touse, Google Earth,” said Sean Wohltman, a Google geospatial engineer.

With hard-drive space always an issue in mobile computing, Google looked for a medium- to high-resolution image product to serve as the base map for the portable Globe, recommending to customers the SPOTMaps line of products. These are fully orthorectified and color-balanced mosaics of recent 2.5-meter, natural color Spot imagery prepared as COTS products for specific countries and regions around the world. The mosaics are produced by Spot Image and delivered in the fusion-ready format compatible with the Google Earth environment.

Wohltman said the SPOTMaps products are the perfect base maps for the mobile application because the file sizes are relatively small for the amount of detail they contain, and Spot Image has already produced mosaics for many parts of the world. Availability of these mosaics in Google Earth formats eliminates weeks of processing and color-balancing for end-users who might otherwise try to create their own mosaics from individual scenes from other satellites, Wohltman added.