Welcome To Opticks

I wanted to post to the Ball Team a big Thank you for the most recent developments to Opticks.  I think these are very good tools to have in this product.  They may even help me in my quest for developing some additional functionality to Opticks.  I have good intentions, but the limitation of the current Earth Day (i.e. 24 hrs) is not enough time for me to do all that I would like to do, one of them doing some development using the Opticks SDK and great product that the Ball Team has put together and continues to support.

I am an Adjunct Professor in GIS at American Rive College teaching a remote sensing and digital image processing class where I would love to use Opticks as a primary teaching tool.  I am not quite there yet since there is still some functionality that I would like to see in Opticks that I don't think is fully developed and I, unfortunately, haven't had the time to work on myself.  I currently teach using ERDAS and cover the following subjects:

Traditional Image classifications - Unsupervised, Supervised, Hybrid, spectral signature creation, analysis, evaluation, editing

Object Based/Feature Based Classification and Identification - Feature Analyst

RADAR - speckle removal, texture analysis

LiDAR - from text file to image dataset creation

Hyperspectral

Image Enhancments - Edge detectors, convolutions using moving windows over multiple bands

Band Ratios - NDVI, Tassled Cap, various band ratios

DEM creation

Image Rectification using Image to Image techniques with one image in "real world" coordinate systems.  I also do an overview to Photogrammetry

Accuracy Assessment - I have a Python script I wrote to create and compute Error Matrices and statistics based on "polygons/zones" rather than individual pixels

Some of my interests are:

Supervised/Unsupervised Classification (the spectral signature work may be moving in this direction)

Spectral Signature Creation/Evaluation/Analysis (some of this may be addressed in the latest releae....I will have to check it out)

RADAR processing - Speckle removal, texture analysis, slant to ground range adjustment

Pixel Based and Neighborhood based processing such as Edge Detectors, convolutions using canned and custom kernel sizes (maybe the techniques are moving in a different directions these days).

I have C++ code from a long time ago (OS2) during my grad school days and was hoping to incorporate with developing some modules for Opticks.  I just haven't been able to put it all together, yet.

Additional work:

Feature Based (Object Based) classification - similar to those of "Feature Analyst" and eCognition for use with high resolution image data to pick things out like buildings, trees, specific cover types, etc.

I also teach a Python class in GIS and started down a path of doing some image processing development using Python which didn't get very far, but I have this vision of creating an image processing algorithms class that would use Opticks as the primary software to teach in.  This, for me, is down the road, but I am trying to promote Opticks as a solid open source image processing package.

I think Opticks is very well set up and supported and has a lot of knowledgable people on board.  I only wish had some more time to help the cause.

Good luck with future developments.  I appreciate all those that work on this full time!

Thank you again.  All the best in future Opticks Development.

Nate

Sr. GIS Analyst - City of Sacramento

Adjunct Professor -  GIS American River College

Freelancer

Opticks Developer wannabe