The Earth-Observation Epitome: A New Interactive Value-Added Product

Typical applications based on remote sensing imagery start with a visual inspection and selection of scenes and regions of interest to be purchased. In this letter, we propose a so-called Earth observation (EO) epitome as a novel value-added interactive product. Basically, it comprises several image tiles, primitive features, metadata entries, a quick look of the image tiles, and semantic annotations of the image content. It comes with a browser that enables the end user to perform a visual inspection of the image content and semantic annotation of the image objects based on machine learning methods. The epitome offers a more complete description of the content of an EO product. It is envisaged that the epitome will be integrated into the TerraSAR-X Payload Ground Segment and will be offered via user services.