Mapping the Green Infrastructure

My presentation on Mapping the Green Infrastructure from the 2009 eCognition User Summit in Munich Germany. I discuss object-based image analysis (OBIA) systems and how we leveraged eCognition software to automatically generate an accurate high-resolution land cover dataset for the entirety of Jefferson County, West Virginia (550 km2) using freely available imagery (USDA NAIP), LiDAR (NRCS), and vector datasets (Jefferson County Commission). Neither the imagery nor the LiDAR were acquired for this project, making this a wonderful example of how automated feature extraction can generate a return on investment from existing datasets. Imagery and LiDAR can provide a gold mine of information, but this type of work requires a robust OBIA system, capable of processing billions of pixels worth of data. While much of the geospatial software industry has been lagging behind in the enterprise category the good folks at Definiens have been offering thier enterprise ready eCognition Server product for many years. An interesting side note - the parcel-based summaries (summarizing land cover for hundreds of thousands of parcels) I show early on in the presentation took just over 8 minutes in eCognition Server compared to 36 hours in ArcGIS (before it crashed). I will cover this is another post.