Vasilios Retsios
software developer ITC
Abstract of the presentation
This article deals with the implementation of open source software for reading digital images of the earth that originate from Eumetsat’s MSG-1 satellite. These images can be received and stored with low cost hardware, and are useful for climate monitoring, land surface analysis and meteorological applications. Unfortunately, they are provided in a non-standard and compressed file format, thus conversion is needed. The choice of software for converting the images is very limited. There is expensive meteorological software available, which would cancel out any benefit of the low cost hardware, and a few affordable utilities that offer only basic conversion options, losing significant information in the process. To take advantage of all the available information in the image data, a team at ITC developed software for properly reading them. For several reasons it was decided to contribute the result to an open source conversion library called GDAL. The most important reasons are that in this way it was possible to avoid also developing code for writing specific file formats, and the final software solution is future-proof. The GDAL library was convincing as the number of supported file formats increased rapidly over the last couple of years, and the conversions are accurate. Several difficulties were encountered in the development process due to the lack of how-to guides and documentation of the GDAL framework. However, this is compensated by the long term benefits, as not only the conversion drivers are brought up-to-date faster than with any commercial software vendor, but also because it has stimulated cooperation with others in the same field.
Bio:
Vasilios Retsios is born in Athens, Greece, on 20 April 1972. In 1990 he moved to the Netherlands for studying Computer Science at the University Twente. In 1996 he acquired an MSc with specialization in system architecture. In 1997 he started working at the International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), developing distance learning GIS and Remote Sensing courses. In 2000 he started working as a software developer in the department of Geo-Software Development at ITC, making major contributions to ITC’s Geographic Information System called ILWIS, and also developing geo-software components that establish research results of the institute. The most recent development is a component for reading and calibrating images from MSG-1, the most recent meteorological satellite launched by EUMETSAT.
Events: Geo Information Systems (GIS)