Overview

About eCognition Suite

Trimble® eCognition® Suite is an advanced analysis software available for geospatial applications. It is designed to improve, accelerate and automate the interpretation of a variety of geospatial data and enables users to design feature extraction or change detection solutions to transform geospatial data into geo-information.

eCognition imports a variety of geospatial data, fusing them together into a rich stack of geo-data for the analysis. The analysis logic is structured into series of steps to create a computer-based representation of an expert’s geospatial interpretation process a so called Rule Set. eCognition then combines the analysis logic with scalable computing power to identify changes over time or features on the earth’s surface across very large sets of data.

This eCognition Suite 10.3 is a major release and includes a range of new features and bug fixes. We recommend upgrading to this new version to benefit from the new features and improvements. For an overview of the highlights and a complete list of new features and bug fixes please refer to the following chapters.

Key Features

Building Analysis Solutions

The eCognition technology examines image pixels not in isolation, but in context. It builds up a picture iteratively, recognizing groups of pixels as objects. Just like the human mind, it uses color, shape, texture, shape and size of objects, as well as their context and relationships, to draw the same conclusions that an experienced analyst would draw.

To build an analysis solution, it is possible to flexibly combine the image interpretation steps like object creation (segmentation), object classification (knowledge based, fuzzy logic, machine learning), object detection (template matching) and object modification (fusing, smoothing, orthogonalization, simplification) into a Rule Set or even a new application (Rule Set with UI) to solve the analysis problem.

The result is a unique approach to translate mind models (why a human interpreter can see the objects, changes, or features in the geospatial data) into computer understandable code (Rule Set) or an individual/customized application.

Leveraging Data Synergies

eCognition can fuse a variety of geospatial data, such as spectral image data, 3D structure data from point clouds and spatial/thematic data from GIS vectors.

The proximity of eCognition to GIS, its ability to link and fuse the available data in an analysis - combined with the straightforward export of results to GIS layers - help eCognition users to achieve outstanding results.

 

 

Efficient Workflows

The eCognition Suite offers three different components which can be used stand-alone or in combination to solve even the most challenging fully automated and semi-automated production tasks:

 

• eCognition Developer is the development environment for object-based image analysis. It is used in geospatial industry to develop Rule Sets or applications for eCognition Architect for the automatic analysis of geospatial data.
• eCognition Architect enables non-technical professionals such as vegetation mapping experts, urban planners or foresters to leverage eCognition technology. Users can easily configure, calibrate and execute analysis applications (Rule Set in combination with a UI) created in eCognition Developer.
• eCognition Server software provides a powerful processing environment for batch and parallel execution of analysis jobs, based on Rule Sets or applications.

 

eCognition Suite 10.3 Highlights

Python Integration

The new algorithm 'python script' allows python code to access and manipulate variables, vector, raster, and point cloud data loaded in eCognition using available methods described in the Python API Reference. The outputs created with python scripts are passed directly to eCognition and can be used for further analysis. Python Environment Manager allows users to create environments with custom package configuration. Debugging functionality allows users to attach any IDE that supports the 'debugpy' remote debugger python module.

Python Integration - Python Script Algorithm

Segmentation Preview

The Segmentation Preview is an interactive tool that allows users to test any segmentation algorithm available in eCognition and calibrate its parameters on a selected area of the scene in a time-efficient way. There is no need to create a scene subset. You can test and calibrate your segmentation using a rectangular window that can be resized and moved to any location of the scene. The segmentation results will be recalculated on the fly.

Tools - Segmentation Preview

Image Registration

A new 'image registration' algorithm is now available in eCognition 10.3. Image registration is an essential preprocessing step in most cases when working with remote sensing imagery. Now users can build more complete workflows in eCognition. The algorithm supports both automatic and manual registration workflows as well as a direct homography matrix as input.

Image Registration Algorithm

Text Recognition

A new algorithm 'text recognition (OCR)' is now available. Based on optical character recognition technology, it recognizes English text in images and converts it to text information.

Text Recognition Algorithm - OCR

User Interface & User Experience

Improving the user interface and user experience is one of the main highlights of version 10.3. In this release we focused on the most frequent user requests including a Raster Calculator for the 'layer arithmetics' algorithm that simplifies the process of building arithmetic expressions, a more interactive and more functional 2D Feature Space Plot, and enabled multi-selection in the View Settings, Process Tree, and Thematic Attribute table.

Layer Arithmetics Algorithm - Raster calculator