Description:
Abstract
High-resolution satellite imagery is ubiquitous in today's society (Ex: Google Maps, Cesium, etc.). The problem with viewing these images is that current state-of-the-art applications require two round-trips to the server every time a user zoom in or zooms out. SLIDER eliminates this limitation. With SLIDER, users are able to zoom in and see any part of a large image at full resolution without downloading the entire data set. This gives users the ability to quickly explore many terabytes worth of satellite imagery over the web.
Description
SLIDER is short for "Satellite Loop Interactive Data Explorer in Real-time," and is a user-friendly web application built to explore time series of extremely high resolution images. SLIDER incorporates a back end "tiling" process where giant images are first chopped into a large set of tiles that represent the image at full resolution. Successive "zoom levels" of tiles are created at lower resolutions until the entire image is shrunken to the size of the single tile. The front end interface initially shows this zoomed-out, scaled-down version of the image. When a user zooms in on a part of the image they would like to see in more detail, the web application downloads the higher resolution image "tiles" for only that particular part of the image. The user can then continue to zoom in until they are able to see the images at their original, full resolution.
Features
* Drag capability
* Toggle on/off maps and latitude/longitude lines
* Choose different time steps and/or number of images to view
* Provides shareable URLs that update in real-time
* View data from a multi-week rolling archive
* Overlay multiple products at once
* Vary each layer's transparency
* Compare multiple products side-by-side
Applications
* Presentation of weather data
* Security footage - comparison of infrared/visible imagery
* Exploring high resolution images from any scientific field - astronomical imagery, medical imaging, microscopic imaging
* Time-lapse photography
