[gdal-dev] [RFC] [GDAL] Idea for GSoC, 2014

[Kshitij Kansal]

Hello Everyone

I am an undergrad student in my Junior year of study. I have been involved
with some research in field of Spatial Temporal Analysis of Images. I have
been using the GDAL for various purposes, for quite some time now. I
thought that now its time to contribute something to Open Source Community.
So I started to think about the GSoC, 2014. As I started browsing the last
year's ideas, one idea that I could relate was "*Raster / Vector
Geo-referencer on the Web*".

*Motivation:*
The main motivation behind this is that, among the very first things that
are required in many remote sensing/geo-spatial related projects are
geo-referenced images. Most of the images that we have are generally not
referenced and hence we have to go to some tool and MANUALLY reference them
with the help of some reference image. This generally takes a lot of time
and most of the times errors do creep in.

*Original Idea:*
What has been proposed in this(as a part of GSoC'13 idea) was that we
should provide two image, one reference image and other un-referenced
image. Now with the help of this we should be able to geo-reference this
unreferenced image by MANUALLY selecting the Control Points. Some thing
like this :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=88gt1gj2dbs

*Modified Idea:*
Now what I felt was that, this idea can be made more innovative and useful
if we can AUTOMATE this whole process of geo-referencing along with
providing the option for manual selection. This is where the knowledge of
Image Processing can help. There are various algorithms(like SIFT/SURF)
which can be used for doing this. We can apply these algorithms and extract
the GCP's and then geo-reference the images. Also, this thing has not been
implemented in any of the other open source softwares(like GRASS,QGIS). So
if we can implement this, other communities can build on these ideas or
even adapt it. It would be "entirely based on GDAL and completely reusable"

Furthermore, this idea can be expanded a lot in the sense that we should
not not put restrictions to the number of bands in the images. Now what I
mean by this is that reference image's bands may not be the same order of
unreferenced. It should work with images of any number of bands.

Any Comments or Suggestions or Feedback ?
Anyone willing to help me in this?

Regards,

Kshitij Kansal

Lab For Spatial Informatics,

IIIT Hyderabad
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