Overview
eCognition is such a powerful software that it is a challenge to summarize all of its advantages and benefits within one chapter. But let's give it a try to introduce some of its main concepts before you can start working through specific tasks learning how to apply the main approaches step-by-step in the following sections.
eCognition is designed to improve, accelerate and automate the interpretation of geospatial data. It enables organizations involved in the remote sensing industry to quickly extract accurate and reliable geo-information from any kind of geospatial data. eCognition software offers capabilities for all kinds of application fields, i.e. Urban, Forestry, Agriculture applications and a variety of different use cases (Feature Extraction, Change Detection).
But what are the advantages - the unique features and the power of eCognition?
Key Benefits
Image Analysis Solutions
Trimble® eCognition® Suite is an advanced image analysis software. It is designed to improve and automate the interpretation of data and enables solutions for feature extraction, change detection, object recognition, and thematic mapping.
eCognition can approach an image in a way the human interpreter would approach an image analysis task and really emulates the human mind’s cognitive power. Its unique approach to translate your mind model - why you see something in the data and what you see - into computer understandable code called "rule set". Thereby highly complex situations and relations can be formulated in an eCognition application. Formulating rule sets and transferring them to other images or setting up flexible rule sets that adapt to properties and singularities of a large amount of data - is one of the big advantages of eCognition.
Not only single pixels but also image objects can be examined with eCognition. Using these objects is something that makes eCognition unique and convincing and inspires to new concepts and smart classification approaches: for instance the usage of color, shape, texture and the size of objects as well as their context and relationships lead to better classification results than pixel based approaches. Once a user conducted a Multiresolution Segmentation - one has to be fond of subdividing an image into these small meaningful objects!
To build an analysis solution, it is possible to combine all powerful processing steps like Image Object Creation (Segmentation), Knowledge Classification, Machine Learning, Template Matching and Object Modification. eCognitions flexibility and adaptability in combining intelligent features, smart classifiers discloses the full information potential of your data leading to high performance output.
eCognition imports and fuses a variety of data - raster images, vector data, 3D data including point cloud data, camera view data, mobile mapping data, and data frames. The analysis logic is developed in a process tree based on a so-called rule set. The rule set can integrate also machine learning approaches (Artificial Intelligence), based on deep learning, convolutional neural networks (CNN). eCognition supports external pre-trained TensorFlow models. Once rule sets are defined, they can be transferred to very large sets of data based on eCognitions server analysis. Monitor rails or detect risk areas for power lines, count cars, ships or planes, apply OCR text recognition - detect your objects of interest - realize any question formulation or apply existing rule sets to your data.
Data Synergies
eCognition can fuse a variety of geospatial data, such as spectral information, 3 D point cloud data and GIS vectors. The proximity of eCognition to GIS, its ability to link and fuse 3D structure, color, texture and elevation information in a classification - combined with the export of results to GIS layers - help eCognition users to achieve outstanding results.
Efficient workflows and products
The combination of eCognitions different software components covers the need of fully automatic and semi-automated production workflows.
eCognition Developer is used to develop rules which guide your geospatial analysis processes. An extensive collection of algorithms can be dynamically combined resulting in a custom application which reflects the user’s desired analysis approach and requirements.
eCognition Architect enables workflow-guided solutions to be created from eCognition Developer logic using a toolbox of predefined UI actions. The resulting applications are easy-to-use and can be configured, calibrated and executed by domain experts. After setting up an application in eCognition Architect, it can be stored and applied to a vast number of images by extending the eCognition installation with eCognition Server.
eCognition Server software provides a processing environment for the batch execution of image analysis jobs. eCognition Developer or eCognition Architect users submit a workspace to eCognition Server which will then automatically process all submitted data in batch mode. You can easily process very large scenes, batch process vast amounts of data, easily administer and monitor all processes, freely scale your production system, and embed your image analysis task into existing workflows.
Software Development Kit (SDK - API) allows the core capabilities of eCognition Developer to be extended by adding algorithms, object features, data drivers and more. In this way, custom segmentations, classifiers, layer operations or object features can be added to the software.
Get an overview on all products on our eCognition website.
April 2023 Trimble eCognition enabled free access to eCognition Essentials Version 1.3 and Oil Palm Application Version 1.3 and 2.0. All users with valid eCognition Developer and eCognition Architect licenses can use these applications free of charge. Details & Downloads: How to access eCognition Oil Palm Application and Essentials
eCognition Essentials is a stand-alone application built on eCognition software technology that covers all steps of sample-based image analysis by applying predefined and structured rules to image analysis tasks.
eCognition Oil Palm Application offers the possibility to automatically detect single palm trees in a plantation using the typical leaf structure to identify individual trees. This plantation management application is based on eCognition Essentials.
The world of eCognition
What makes eCognition so unique - it is not easy to break this down to some headwords because it is such a variety of points and a combination of smaller and bigger reasons that can barely be described here in a profound and satisfying way.
Our proposition is - take the plunge - try eCognition on your own now - guided by this documentation and using all means of assistance in our community and by trying our trial versions of the different products - and we hope that you find eCognition as compelling and irresistible as we do...
... enjoy entering the world of eCognition - combine human and artificial intelligence!
