LEOWorks 4 for teaching Earth Observation – Current State and Future Upgrades

As part of its educational mandate the European Space Agency ESA is maintaining the Eduspace website for learning, teaching and demonstrating Earth Observation techniques to secondary schools. At the heart of Eduspace lies the LEOWorks software which began as a simple but effective educational image processing tool, including only the most basic functions for viewing and processing imagery. Over the years the software has expanded in line with increasing availability of satellite imagery and algorithms for image processing. In its current version (LEOWorks 3) this package is able to perform more advanced processing operations including data analyses, data manipulation and filtering, image classification, geometric correction, image calibration and image animation. Moreover, it contains GIS tools that enable the user to display and query ESRI-based files in connection with images and generate additional layers among various other specific GIS operations.
In the geospatial software domain, it is becoming increasingly more popular to follow an open source philosophy and Java implementation enabling widely spread code sharing and assuring platform independence at the same time. As LEOWorks 3 is based on IDL, the extent for future development is somewhat limited and it was hence decided for version 4 to be open source and implemented in Java. LEOWorks 4 benefits greatly from the existing ESA toolboxes BEAM and NEST, for optical and radar image processing respectively, that are also programmed in Java and open source. The additional functionality of LEOWorks 4 with respect to LEOWorks 3 will indeed combine optical and radar remote sensing as well a more extensive GIS module in a didactically presented package. Users will be able to directly import optical and radar satellite data from ESA’s Envisat and other satellite missions (like ESA Third Party Missions) and perform filtering, band mathematics, classifications, calibrations or coregistrations amongst many other complex functions. Besides the use for secondary school teaching, the more complex functionality of LEOWorks also targets the university entry level for EO education in order to provide an introduction to scientific EO data exploitation before users start scientifically complex processing using software packages such as BEAM or NEST. While this opens up a new user audience, LEOWorks 4 will keep a simple user-friendly interface, appropriate for its key use in secondary school classrooms.
LEOWorks 4 is a project of 3-year duration which started in September 2008 with support from the developers responsible for the implementation of BEAM and NEST. This presentation will demonstrate the first major release to the user audience, who will be able to access LEOWorks 4 over the Eduspace Portal.