Space Make the Virtual a Reality: A Web-Based Platform for Visualization and Analysis with Earth Observation Satellite Data

Virtual Earth has become an effective tool for browsing geospatial data. These Virtual Reality based geospatial information systems, are successfully employed today for real-time visualization in such diverse fields as urban planning, city planning and architectural design. On the basis of experience of satellite stereo image processing, web-based service, and cloud data management system, we composed 3D geospatial visualization, automatic terrain models generation, massive satellite image tiling and other cutting-edge technologies and advanced concepts, in order to build an integrated platform of virtual Earth. This paper demonstrates design and implementation of this Geo Image Hub system with architecture, components and applications. The data processing approach uses multiview-stereo imagery from China's land observation satellites as a starting point, and the work focuses on ortho-rectification method and regularized elevation information extraction. A map service provided by the SIWEI Earth RESTful API is leveraged to access high resolution satellite images of nationwide coverage. The web-based application is deployed on ECS Cloud that runs the algorithms and presents the results. With remote sensing satellite data, visualization experiences can be extended beyond the simulated environment, feature realistic live mapping and provide valuable information.