County of Essex Provides a Clear View with Full-Colour Imagery (ESRI)

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The County of Essex provides a clear view with full - colour imagery Case Study Challenge: The County of Essex was looking to improve the quality of their imagery by replacing grayscale images with full colour, high - resolution aerial photos.The new images were too large to display using internet clients, resulting in a system crash. Goals: • To substitute full colour, high resolution imagery for grayscale • To make the new images readily available to users • To find a solution that would eliminate storage capacity limitations • To serve data quickly and to multiple users Results: • Users can view high resolution imagery without having to wait for large files to load • Data is served up faster than ever before and imagery refreshes in a fraction of the time • The County is no longer bottlenecked by storage limitations and can serve up more imagery to better serve clients • Multiple users can be accom- modated at once and data quality is never compromised Overview The County of Essex is the southernmost county in Canada and the second most populated in Ontario. It is one of the most agriculturally productive counties in the country, and a leader in manufacturing. The County's Geographic Information System (GIS) Department is responsible for coordinating various GIS activities for seven local municipalities and helps to determine GIS software and hardware needs, promote the establishment of spatial data and technology standards, and provide direction for the management of regional spatial datasets. In 2006, the County of Essex purchased aerial photography for all seven of its municipalities with the intention of upgrading existing grayscale images to full colour. Imagery products are leveraged by many different departments within each municipality and made available to the public. The shift from grayscale to full colour imagery nearly tripled the size of storage required, leading the County of Essex to seek a new solution that would enable them to effectively process, manage and serve up the large volume of imagery both internally and over the web. The Challenge The County of Essex was looking to improve the service they were supplying to local municipalities by replacing existing H grayscale imagery with ° • full colour high _ ' s t7 i i5 I resolution images that x were flown at a scale of P , 1:10,000. When the GIS � - .. - �e • i department attempted to store the aerial * - photography as g Y compressed raster imagery and serve it up through ArcIMS, the w �. interactive mapping 1. J sites became unstable Al ` ESRI Software Used and prone to crash A full colour, high resolution aerial photograph of a residential neighbourhood in • ArcGIS Server Image Extension during a request. The the County of Essex. • ArcGIS Server, ArcIMS images were simply too large to display in a fashion that the County and municipalities had become accustomed to. The County was in need of a new approach to image management that would enable them to quickly access, display and serve up their new full - colour imagery. The Solution ESRI Canada The County of Essex had previously stored imagery as compressed mosaiced images and leveraged ArcIMS technology to make the data available to municipal departments and online for public consumption. When the GIS department discovered that the new full-