| The Center of Excellence in Remote Sensing Education and Research (CERSER) website currently maintains a database of images processed by the Terascan System. The NOAA or SeaWiFS satellites make multiple passes each day feeding data to the Terascan system in Dixon Hall. This set of data is then processed by the TeraScan system and an image in Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) is produced and placed on the CERSER server in a folder labeled “original”. Each image once processed must then be renamed, resized, converted to Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) format and added to a database. This process is done manually by an individual using a graphics software package and manually entering the image information into the database for each satellite.
This year’s Multimedia team took on the task of automating this process utilizing Active Server Pages (ASP) and graphic software packages that can be controlled by the Visual Basic Scripting language. The team tried several graphic software packages such as Macromedia Fireworks and Adobe Photoshop, settling on the open-license (free) package ImageMagick ® due to its ability to be implemented from the Windows command line.
The outline of the steps that this process is:
- Call the ASP page daily utilizing the Windows Scheduler
- ASP code processes the image using the following steps:
- Convert Date and Satellite information from the file name
- Open Terascan Database to obtain new file name
- Write new record to the database
- Open ImageMagick ®
- Convert/Resize/Rename original image to Actual, Medium, Low, and thumbnail folders
- Delete original image file
|
