Tuesday, October 20, 2009

PCI Geomatics Announces Key Executive Appointment in USA

Richmond Hill, Ontario – October 20, 2009: PCI Geomatics, a world leading developer of geo-imaging software and systems, is pleased to announce the appointment of Michael Hollis to the position of President and CEO of PCI Geomatics Corporation (USA).

"I am pleased to welcome Mike to this role and look forward to leveraging his expertise, energy and industry knowledge to take our business to the next level," said Dr. Robert Moses, President and CEO of the Canadian-based parent company PCI Geomatics Enterprises Inc.

"I am excited about continuing to pursue my interests in remote sensing and information technology applications in this new capacity with PCI Geomatics," said Michael Hollis. "PCI brings technical excellence and innovation to the geo-information market, and its new emphasis on automated image processing solutions will help our customers increase productivity and reduce operating costs."

Mr. Hollis brings over 30 years of experience in the aerospace and information technology industries. Prior to joining PCI Geomatics, he served as a Naval Aviator and acquisition professional, and as President of four small high technology U.S. defense companies.

Mr. Hollis holds a B.S. Naval Science degree from the U.S. Naval Academy, a M.S. in Management and a M.S. in Aeronautical Engineering from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, and is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School. He has served on the Board of Directors of multiple companies and is currently a member of the Board of Aero-Mechanical Industries, Inc.

About PCI Geomatics

PCI Geomatics is a world leading developer of hardware/software systems for geo-imaging solutions. Since 1982, we have specialized in remote sensing, digital photogrammetry, spatial analysis, cartographic production, automated production systems, image management and on demand mapping solutions. PCI Geomatics’ advanced hardware/software systems address a wide variety of industry applications including the environment, agriculture, security and intelligence, aerospace & defense, and satellite receiving stations. We have the expertise and know-how to turn images into useful information.

For more information, visit www.pcigeomatics.com.

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Press Contact
Alysia Vetter
Marketing Manager
Tel: 819-770-0022, Ext. 233
Fax: 819-770-0098
Email: vetter@pcigeomatics.com
Web: www.pcigeomatics.com

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

PCI Geomatics Delivers an Automated Image Processing System to COTESA in Support of MGCP Requirements

Richmond Hill, Ontario – October 15, 2009: PCI Geomatics, a world leading developer of geo-imaging software and systems, is pleased to announce that it has successfully delivered an operational automated system for the orthorectification, pansharpening and mosaicking of large volumes of satellite imagery to COTESA, a privately held GIS company based in Valladolid, Spain.

The Spanish Government is working with COTESA to fulfill its requirements under the Multinational Geospatial Co-production Program (MGCP), undertaken by 28 NATO nations participating in the production of global high-resolution vector geospatial data.

Employing PCI Geomatics’ advanced component architecture (GeomaticaX), the highly automated system is used to operationally process high resolution satellite imagery from QuickBird, IKONOS and SPOT-5. The volume of data to be processed with PCI Geomatics’ ProLines, is estimated at 10,000 images over a three year period. PCI’s Proline system is highly modular, providing COTESA the ability to easily add additional processing capability, thus increasing throughput and performance as required.

"PCI Geomatics is happy to be providing an image correction system which will not only save COTESA time and money, but also produce high quality output products," said Dr. Robert Moses, President and CEO of PCI Geomatics.

"COTESA has considered the wide spectrum of image processing products in the marketplace and has chosen PCI Geomatics due to the high quality of the results provided by Geomatica's algorithms and the substantial increase in processing capability acquired with the solution implemented," said Dr. Francisca Gómez, head of COTESA’s Environment Department and responsible of the MGCP project development.

To learn more about GeomaticaX and PCI’s automated processing offerings, visit
www.pcigeomatics.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=24&Itemid=5.

About COTESA

COTESA specializes in the development of GIS and remote sensing applications, services and solutions. COTESA has been involved for 10+ years in the design, development and implementation of many projects related to environmental and natural resources management. COTESA cooperates with various research and industry including: Thematic cartography, remote sensing and digital image processing, risk assessment and management, environmental indicators, and forestry management.

For more information, visit www.grupotecopy.es/cotesa.

About PCI Geomatics

PCI Geomatics is a world leading developer of hardware/software systems for geo-imaging solutions. Since 1982, we have specialized in remote sensing, digital photogrammetry, spatial analysis, cartographic production, automated production systems, image management and on demand mapping solutions. PCI Geomatics’ advanced hardware/software systems address a wide variety of industry applications including the environment, agriculture, security and intelligence, aerospace & defense, and satellite receiving stations. We have the expertise and know-how to turn images into useful information.

For more information, visit www.pcigeomatics.com.

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Press Contact
Alysia Vetter
Marketing Manager
Tel: 819-770-0022, Ext. 233
Fax: 819-770-0098
Email: vetter@pcigeomatics.com
Web: www.pcigeomatics.com

Monday, October 5, 2009

PCI Geomatics Inc. and Iunctus Geomatics Corp. make a complete map of Alberta in one weekend! (Alberta is a slightly bigger landmass than France)

Last Friday before leaving for the weekend, the PCI Geomatics Research and Development team set up a large mosaic processing task to test our new distributed job processing system.

The test data consisted of 349 SPOT-5 B scenes (panchromatic, 2.5 m pixel size) that covered the province of Alberta from the extensive Iunctus Geomatics Corp. SPOT archive. The reference data was a Landsat derived mosaic of Alberta and a subset of road vectors from the Canadian Road Network data set.

Needless to say, we were very pleased to see that when we returned on Monday morning, that a high quality 2.5 m panchromatic mosaic of Alberta had been produced in just 51 hours and 20 minutes!

There were a number reasons that we are particularly pleased with the outcomes of this test. The first, and most obvious reason is that the overall mosaic is of such high quality. The neighborhood tone balancing was effective, with only few poor quality areas that were limited by availability of imagery without haze (and low dynamic range). The geometric accuracy was also very good, with 294 scenes having total GCP residual under 2.5 pixels.

In a production environment the unsatisfactory scenes would be corrected during the process suspension through manual GCP collection, or adjustment of their radiometry. If a scene was beyond repair it could easily be replaced with new data with the help of the mosaic update workflow.

We were also very pleased that it demonstrated the practical functionality of the distributed job processing system. By concurrently running multiple processing threads on four CPU servers with 15 simultaneous jobs running in the system, production rate was greatly enhanced.

This system was created for a development project undertaken by PCI, Iunctus Geomatics Corp. and the Alberta Terrestrial Imaging Center (ATIC), and funded by Precarn Inc. and Alberta Advanced Education and Technology. The configuration of this particular processing system was designed to meet production throughput requirements of 800 scenes per week, in other terms, processing rates of 12.6 minutes per scene. We achieved a higher throughput rate (8.9 minutes per scene), using this system (a multi-CPU configuration with distributed job processing system). PCI offers a hardware accelerated system, the GeoImaging Accelerator; using this type of system the throughput would improve to 2.8 minutes per scene! That would have meant that the Alberta mosaic would have taken less than 1 day (16 hours!) to complete. If you are facing challenges processing diverse, high volume datasets in an automated manner, contact PCI Geomatics today!