Human perception and interpretation is an indispensable component in many aspects of remote sensing image analysis and other types of geodata processing such as GIS and cartography. The work of a human operator is often considered ground truth without any variability, but psychological studies in comparable areas suggest that this perfect picture is not completely realistic. In order to reach a better understanding the Ghent University is inquiring this subject through the project entitled “Web-Based Assessment of Operator Performance and Variability in Remote Sensing Image Analysis”. A web tool with psychological tests and image analysis tasks has been developed and currently we are looking for people who want to participate. A lot of data are indispensible to obtain valuable results, so please go through the online test Most people need around one hour to go through the entire web tool. As we realize this is quite a long time, we are pleased to offer something in return:

• You receive feedback consisting of a personal profile.
• You can win a netbook! We give away two Dell Latitude 2100 Netbooks.
• And last, but not least: we truly believe that the whole (remote sensing) community can benefit from a better understanding of operator variability.

Still catching up recent geonews, last week the FGT blog mentioned the open source imagery analysis project named OpenDragon. While the project has been around for over 5 years, we never mentioned it in the past. From the official website: "OpenDragon provides a robust suite of image processing operations, via an intuitive, responsive, multi-window graphical user interface. Software functionality includes full-color display, annotation, enhancement, measurement, supervised and unsupervised classification, georeferencing, on-screen vector capture, and a broad range of other capabilities to support image processing education and research. OpenDragon can access image and data files created by earlier releases of commercial Dragon, can run scripts created for other versions, and is backward compatible in its organization and navigation. OpenDragon uses an innovative client-server architecture and is based on platform-independent industry standards including Java, XML and HTML. The OpenDragon architecture supports new levels of user extensibility and will eventually allow the software to execute on Windows, Linux, Mac OS/X, and Solaris and other Unix variants. " We previously mentioned a few other similar software, Opticks is one example.