NAIP 2008: states with 4-band imagery

2008 NAIP is making its way to the public domain. Several states participated in the "upgrade" to 4-band (blue, green, red, NIR) imagery. The map below shows 2008 NAIP products by state.

NAIP acquisition cycle - partner up!

The USDA has release the NAIP acquisition cycle for 2009-2011. NAIP is acquired as a true color (3-band) product by default. It is relatively affordable to partner-up with the USDA to upgrade to a 4-band true color/color infrared product. For example, it cost us in VT only $20k to upgrade from 3-band to 4-band in 2008. 4-band imagery is far superior for everything from impervious surface mapping to change detection. With state orthophoto programs feeling the pinch, NAIP provides an affordable way to insure consistent imagery exists for your state. As NAIP is public domain anyone can use the data.

The migration to 64-bit - has it started?

If you are like me, that heavy duty dual quad-core 64-bit workstation sitting under your desk that keeps your toes warm during the winter doesn’t get much of a workout from most of your desktop geospatial applications. The vast majority, and certainly the most prevalent applications, are written for 32-bit operating systems. Thus, they can make use of 2GB of memory at the most. With the size of geospatial datasets getting larger each year, you, like me, have likely received your share of error messages relating to memory limitations when working with these large datasets.

Needless to say I was pretty excited when I heard from the folks at Applied Imagery about the 64-bit version of their flagship QT Modeler LiDAR software. Although I've had the 64-bit version of QT Modeler kicking around for a few weeks it was only this afternoon that I finally got around to increasing the memory on my Dell T7400 running Vista-64 to 32GB (at a cost of a little over $1000). I fired up the 64-bit version of QT Modeler, loaded in the entire Baltimore City LiDAR dataset (122 LAS tiles), and was happily flying through billions of LiDAR points like I was in Google Earth.

Will more companies follow Applied Imagery’s lead, I don’t know, but let’s hope so.