ESCI
442/542: Introduction to Remote Sensing
Laboratory
Exercises
This page last updated: 2/24/2024
Required lab text: NONE
Required lab material: A place to store at least 1 or 2 Gbytes of stuff. We will be working with lots of large files in the lab and you will need a place to store these files. Every student at WWU automatically has storage space on your Onedrive account. In addition, I would strongly recommend that each of you purchase a USB portable drive as a back-up. USB portable drives (also known as “Jump drives” or “Thumb drives”) are very cheap, very portable and very convenient. I’d strongly recommend that you get in the habit of making sure that you have two copies of everything you do for this class. Keep one copy on your Onedrive account and another copy on your USB drive. USB drives come in a wide variety of storage capacities. At present, I believe that you get the greatest storage capacity per $ in the 16-32 Gbyte drives. I have seen USB drives in this size range for as little as $15-$20. Compact external hard drives with capacities of 500 Gbytes up to 4 Terabyte (4000 Gbytes) are also available for ~$50-~$150. You can shop around locally (NW Computer supplies; Best Buy; Costco; Office Depot) and online to see if you can get a better deal.
Objectives: The basic objective of the lab is to give you the opportunity to apply the principles discussed in lecture and give you some hands on experience with digital imagery and with image processing software. We will have the opportunity to work with data from several different satellites.
Introduction: To accomplish our objectives, we will be spending quite a bit of time in AH16 this term. AH16 houses the Spatial Analysis Lab. Many of you are already very familiar with this lab. Funding to establish this lab was provided by a grant from the Student Technology Fee program way back in 1997. At that time, computers were powered by rubber bands and cranks…..or maybe squirrels. Several additional grants from the Student Technology Fee program since then have enabled us to upgrade the lab significantly. With these upgrades, the computers in the lab are among the most powerful PCs on campus. Additional information about the Spatial Analysis Lab, and many useful links can be found at the Spatial Analysis Lab Home Page
You will be learning to use an image-processing package by a company called ENVI. There are several leading image-processing packages that are widely used for manipulating digital imagery. ENVI is probably the number one selling package and it might even be the best one out there. Other widely used software packages include PCI and ERDAS. As you might imagine, all three packages have strong supporters and detractors. There are also quite a number of free or very cheap image processing software packages out there. As you might imagine, you get what you pay for. At any rate, knowledge of ERDAS, PCI or ENVI and the principles you learn by using one of these software packages should enable you to learn any of the other packages very quickly. We used PCI and ERDAS for a number of years. I have become increasingly unhappy with ERDAS in recent years and, I made the switch to ENVI a few years ago. I developed new labs for the ENVI software I continue to revise and update these lab exercises. I am adding a few new labs this year. Be forewarned! There will be unavoidable bugs in these lab exercises! Your patience with us as I develop and refine labs these will be much appreciated.
One of the disadvantages of using ERDAS – or ENVI or PCI for that matter -- is that the software is very, very expensive. For this reason, we have a limited number of software licenses. The high cost of the software is the main reason for the relatively high course fee for this class. The software is only available on the computers in the Spatial Analysis Lab. This means that you will need to do all of your work in this lab. We cannot make the software available for loading on your own machines at home. An advantage of doing all of your work in the lab is that there will often be someone else from this class working there and you can help each other as you learn the software.
One final note regarding software. ArcPro, which is used for all of our GIS classes and which many of you may be quite familiar, has some of the same functionality that is available in ENVI. In fact, I’m pretty sure that ArcPro has simply licensed a bunch of stuff from ENVI and wrapped this into ArcPro. However, the features that are offered in ArcPro seem to represent a stripped down version of ENVI and lack some of the options that are offered in ENVI. For this reason, we will mostly be using ENVI although we will dip into ArcPro for a few of our labs. If you are an ArcPro wizard, you might be tempted to do all of your work in ArcPro rather than ENVI. If you choose to go this route, you are welcome to do so but recognize that all of my instructions are based on ENVI and I will not be able to help you if you choose to work in ArcPro. You will be on your own. I strongly advise against this.
Lab Reports: The lab reports are intended to enable you summarize and
describe the image analysis work done in the various labs. An ancillary benefit is that the course will
help you to improve your writing skills in general and specifically provide you
with experience with science writing.
The course counts towards one of the three “Writing Proficiency” points
that are required as part of your undergraduate degree. Some labs may require more than a single week
to complete. All labs will require
some work on your own in the lab outside our regularly scheduled lab periods.
See the Spatial Analysis
Lab schedule to find open time slots. All lab reports should be written in
the format of a standard scientific paper. (Click
here for information on the proper format, organization and grading criteria
for your lab reports). NOTE: Ignoring the guidelines provided here will
have an adverse impact on your grade!
Lab Grade: Your lab grade will be based on your lab reports . The lab reports (described above) are written reports with perhaps five pages of text plus tables and figures. Some of our labs may take more than a week to complete and, for this reason, we may not get through all of the lab exercises that I have scheduled below. We may have up to seven lab reports this quarter. You can drop your lowest lab report grade or you can elect not to turn in one of the lab reports (but see the note below; there is one lab for which everyone is required to write a lab report).
Academic Dishonesty: I’m sure it comes as no surprise that cheating in any form, either during exams or in the lab, will not be tolerated. All students are encouraged to familiarize themselves with the University’s Academic Dishonesty Policy and Procedure in Appendix D of the University Bulletin. You should be particularly careful when preparing lab reports. In recent years, I have noted a disturbing increase in the incidence of plagiarism. If you copy any text from any source and paste it directly into a lab report without attribution (placing it in quotes), this is plagiarism. If and when you are caught, you will, at the very least, receive a failing grade for this assignment and you may also be subjected to additional disciplinary action as specified by university policy.
Lab Schedule: Click on the headings below to obtain the specific details of each assignment. It will be extremely important for you to develop systematic and consistent work habits in the computer lab. Failure to do so will lead to enormous frustration and many wasted hours. Following a few simple WORKING GUIDELINES will save you a great deal of time.
Note: Here is a link to a nifty tool for help in selecting color schemes: http://colorbrewer2.org/
Dates listed for each lab are
tentative. I may also switch the order
of some of the labs. Note that, unless otherwise noted, all lab reports are due
at the beginning of lab on the listed date.
(Some of these links may not yet be active)
First Lab: The Internet, Screen
Capture and Getting Acquainted with the image processing software (Lab for
January 9-12); Short ungraded assignment from this lab due ASAP but no later
than Jan. 12. (Lab 1: ENVI instructions)
Second Lab: Environmental Warfare in
the Persian Gulf (Lab for January 16-19); Lab report from this lab due Jan 23 or 24 (Lab 2: ENVI
Instructions)
Third Lab: Unsupervised
Classification (Lab for Jan 23-26; it will take two weeks
to complete this lab.); Lab report from this lab due on Feb 6 or 7. Note that everyone is required to turn in a
report for this lab. (Lab 3: ENVI instructions)
Fourth Lab: Change Detection (Lab for Feb 6-9) (Lab 4: ENVI Instructions). Lab
report from this lab due on Feb. 11 or 12
Feb 13 or 14 Midterm week is
busy. So, due to popular request, due date for this lab is pushed back to
Friday, Feb 16 at 5PM.
No lab the week of Feb. 12-16 Mid-term exam week.
Fifth Lab: Image
Segmentation and Supervised Classification with ArcPro
(Lab for 2/20-23) Lab report for this lab due Feb. 27 or 28.
Second
Ground Truth Assignment: GPS data for
WorldView-2 Image Segmentation (To be completed on your own and turned in
no later than 9:00AM on Feb. 15; This will require fieldwork on your own prior
to this date) We will use existing
data. You will not be required to collect any additional data.
Sixth Lab: Using LIDAR Data to
examine Channel Migration in the North Fork of the Nooksack River (Sixth Lab: Monitoring Channel Migration Using
LIDAR) (2/27-3/1). Lab report from this lab due on Mar. 5
or 6.
Seventh Lab: Evaluation of recreational impacts on eelgrass using UAS and virtual
ground truth data Evaluation
of recreational impacts on eelgrass using UAS and virtual ground truth data
(3/5-8) Lab report due Mar. 12 or 13
A LIST OF USEFUL REMOTE SENSING LINKS
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