Develepment And Application Of ENVI Tools For ArcGIS

With the development of the remote sensing image processing software and GIS software and the increasing and changing demand of users, the remote sensing software and GIS software are becoming more and more closely.The combination of the two functions becomes increasingly urgent. The remote sensing image processing software and GIS software have their own advantages.The remote sensing image processing software focus on image data processing,usually only providing basic GIS processing function. While GIS software is more focused on the vector data's management and analysis.However, in actual scientific research and practical applications,the remote sensing image data is an essential information source of GIS.Therefore, to complete a GIS work, the remote sensing image processing function is usually necessary. At this time, to combine the remote sensing image processing software with GIS software will get the respective merits and will complement each other, so that users can create the operational processes with both image processing and GIS analysis functions on GIS platform.Thus it can enhance the operability and efficiency of the GIS software,which is very important and meaningful.ENVI (The Environment for Visualizing Images) is a remote sensing image processing software which is developed by ITT Visual Information Solutions company.ENVI is developed by IDL (Interactive Data Language). It began to cooperate with ESRI from 2007.In October 2010, ENVI 4.8 products was released.It provides the ENVI Tools for ArcGIS which is contained in the ArcGIS Toolbox.The ENVI Tools for ArcGIS means integrating some ENVI functions to ArcGIS as the Geoprocessing Tools.These ENVI Tools are process-oriented image analysis tools.ArcGIS users can use them to do the image processing and analysis in ArcGIS environment:directly from the ArcGIS Toolbox,or adding new ENVI Tools to ArcGIS Toolbox which may be the user-defined functions.Even more,users could use these tools to build new GP model to analysis things. Thus, it will greatly improve the work efficiency by integrating ENVI Tools to ArcGIS when doing remote sensing image processing and GIS analysis as data flow's mode.This article is mainly based on the theme of combining remote sensing with GIS software platform.It study the principles and methods of how to add the ENVI remote sensing image processing functions to the ArcGIS platform. First it analyzed the architecture of ENVI software and the approach of how to develop a custom ENVI function. Then the article studied detailly the principle, framework, development methodology, application of the ENVI Tools for ArcGIS provided by ENVI 4.8 and summarized its advantages in practical work.At last, taking an application as an example, the article described the specific steps of development and application of ENVI Tools for ArcGIS in detail, which proved it could simplify the complexity of the development and operation process and improve work efficency by adding ENVI functions to the ArcGIS platform, modeling and analysis with GIS functions together and using the batch function of GP tools.