Last week I attended the annual GRSG conference (Geological Remote Sensing Group) in London. At the GRSG conference a great deal is crammed into 3 days – talks, papers, networking and workshops. This year I put together a brief workshop on Python for image processing. If you’d like the notebook that I presented you can find it all here.
We went through the following topics:
- Intro to NumPy arrays (images are just NumPy arrays)
- Plotting data using Matplotlib
- Manipulating NumPy arrays (conditional and slicing operations)
- GDAL (opening images and plotting)
- Rasterio (opening images and plotting)
- Stretching images (skimage)
- Computer vision on images
Admittedly it is a lot of information, especially for a beginner, to handle in such a short period of time, but hopefully the attendees found it useful. The key takeaway I hope I emphasized was to try and get yourself accustomed to handling data with NumPy. Once you build some familiarity you’ll be amazed at the amount of powerful tools available for you to process Earth Observation data.
There is so much more
I often hear of people saying they wish they could code, or having started they hit a brick wall and have nowhere to go. Or, that it is not for them. Writing code is for everyone.
You don’t have to limit yourself. By picking up a bit of computer programming you allow yourself to start to become the artist. You are not restricted to what a piece of software says you can do. You can make the rules.
“Art isn’t only a painting. Art is anything that’s creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.” – Seth Godin
For me though, coding helps me solve problems, speeds up or even removes the boring repetitive stuff and allows me to take Earth Observation to wherever I want to go.
Workshop data is all here.
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I have grouped all my previous blogs (technical stuff / tutorials / opinions / ideas) at http://gis.acgeospatial.co.uk.
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image credit https://unsplash.com/photos/KigTvXqetXA