About

General description

The LEOWorks project aims to address the issues faced by upper secondary school students and their teachers by providing them with an educational tool in order to deal with Earth Observation data and produce information (images, vectors). The software, written in Java, is flexible enough to allow addition of modules for advanced processing so that it can be used at university level. LEOWorks is licensed under a General Public License (GPL).

Some of the major features include:

  • Raster support for a large number of formats
  • Display images in grayscale, RGB
  • Edit the color palette used to display an image
  • Image enhancement (contrast, filter)
  • Perform measurement of images
  • Unsupervised and supervised image classification
  • Create, edit and query vector data
  • Temporal series animation

Brief history

LEOWorks began as a simple didactical image processing software, including only the most basic functions for viewing and processing imagery. The software has expanded in line with increasing availability of satellite imagery and algorithms for processing.

First versions of LEOWorks were based on IDL, which limits the extent of future development. It was hence decided that version 4 shall be open source and based on Java. The main reason to rebuild LEOWorks from version 3 was to make it platform independent, avoiding recurrent high licence fees. In addition much higher flexibility and a more efficient use of the limited computing resources, typically occurring in schools (and universities), will become possible. Furthermore this rebuilding allows significant enhancement to the software, by exploiting existing material primarily from BEAM/NEST and the new ESA SNAP platform and the associated Toolboxes.

Development technologies

LEOWorks 4 is using the following technologies:

Supported platforms

LEOWorks 4 is platform independent and should work equally well on all families of operating systems (e.g. Windows, MacOSX, Linux).