ER Mapper Tops 2002 NIMA Pathfinder Report

SAN DEIGO, CA, May 2002 - Earth Resource Mapping's image processing and Internet delivery product - ER Mapper was the only product to receive "Most Favourable" ratings in all fifteen categories of the NIMA Pathfinder 2002 Multispectral and Hyperspectral (MSI/HSI) Imagery Exploitation Tools.

For the Pathfinder 2002 assessment, 40 commercial and government vendors submitted 52 candidate tools to the Pathfinder team. The critical issue was to find tools that would enable NIMA and its customers to quickly and accurately extract and depict the necessary information from a spectral image. ER Mapper was recognised as having strong functionality, excellent ease of use, and fully integrated processing, distribution and serving of imagery.

The Pathfinder 2002 Tools Overview noted, "ER Mapper provides an environment for processing MSI and color image data. It provides predefined wizards for a variety of tasks. Users can process images without saving any intermediate files; what is saved is the process flow (set of algorithms) used to create the final product. The power of this tool is its ability to compress large files using its enhanced compressed wavelet (ECW) technology and the ability to process the compressed files without need to uncompress them. This allows for fast processing of large datasets."

Evaluation of products focused on low to high-end tools, both COTS and GOTS products, to assist in the exploitation of spectral data. Some of the uses include crop monitoring, navigation safety, trafficability studies, and change detection.

Each candidate tool possessed some capacity to improve spectral exploitation in the near future, thereby enhancing the ways MSI/HSI data are manipulated, presented, understood, and used.

Chris Ribbel, Director of the Americas Region for Earth Resource Mapping said, "It is always nice to receive the highest marks when compared with the other products in the industry. 13 years since first release, ER Mapper's algorithm approach is still unique in how it processes imagery, and that certainly contributed to the favorable review." Mr. Ribbel went on to say "The increased use ER Mapper by the DoD community is enabling us to place greater emphasis on enhancing national data format support in future releases."

About Earth Resource Mapping

Earth Resource Mapping is the world's leading image handling and integrated mapping software company. Clients in more than 120 countries use ER Mapper to prepare imagery, ECW to compress and use imagery, and the Image Web Server to serve imagery over the Internet.

About NIMA Pathfinder 2002

The award-winning Pathfinder program provides flexible, critical, acquisition-compliant links among commercial developers, vendors, NIMA, and the community of interest. Recently recognized by the Armed Forces Communication and Electronic Association (AFCEA) with the first-ever Golden Link Award, the process used in Pathfinder 2002 complies with DoD directives for acquisition, and thus the results should assist government users wanting to procure any of the tools evaluated. A complete review of Pathfinder 2002 is available.

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Source: Material used in press releases is often supplied by external sources and used as is.