Lab 6 - Spatial Enhancements

View of the spatially enhanced image.

This week we utilized our newly acquired ERDAS Imagine skills to apply visual enhancements to raster imagery.  The image above originally had these thick black diagonal lines crossing through it - with the spatial enhancement measures applied these lines are not quite as noticeable.

The enhancements were applied using both the ERDAS Imagine software and ArcGIS.  The processing began with ERDAS Imagine by applying a Fourier transformation with a low pass filter.  Then the image was further processed by applying a 3x3 sharpening effect (the 3x3 refers to the number of cells used as the kernel for the enhancements).

The image was then opened in ArcGIS, since this program has a Focal Statistics tool (and ERDAS Imagine doesn't quite have these statistics in its arsenal of enhancements).  After setting the Focal Statistics tool to run a rectangular 3x3 mean pass the image was considered to be ready for the final map layout.

While the diagonal lines haven't disappeared completely at least it is now possible to figure out what the features in the image are.  Apparently it is possible to remove those diagonal lines, but that requires some additional (advanced) techniques... trying to get the Fourier transformation correct for this exercise was difficult as it was.