Lab 5a - Intro to ERDAS Imagine and Digital Data 1

This lab was primarily an introduction to the ERDAS Imagine software and using it to perform some basic photo interpretation tasks. The first part of the lab was to perform some calculations using Maxwell's wave theory and the Planck relation to answer some questions about various spectral regions in the electromagnetic spectrum. The second part of the lab was some introduction to ERDAS Imagine. Some tasks performed were displaying data in the data viewer, learning some of the settings allowed within the software, and navigating an image. Navigating an image was rather interesting for me. When using the Pan tool, the program would lock into the Pan mode and just kept panning slowly. Nothing I did got me out of it and the program would not respond. However, when panning by clicking the middle mouse button, it worked just fine, so I will continue panning using that method. We learned how to have a second viewer and to compare different bands of the same image to distinguish certain features. I thought the ease of changing which layer corresponded to the green, red, and blue bands in the Multispectral tab was very useful, and I'm sure I'll use that in the future. I'll probably have to look back at notes at first to recall which type of band combination I want to use to distinguish different features, such as snow, mountains, vegetation type, etc.
The third part was to create a map using a classified image of forested lands in Washington state. I added the data to the ERDAS Imagine viewer and added an area column to the attribute table. One thing I really like about this program is the Inquire Box to select an area to export. Expanding the box by clicking the corner of it and moving it by clicking inside it is very intuitive, and creating a subset image and exporting it was straightforward as well. After creating the subset image, I opened ArcMap and simply added it using the Add Data button. At this point, creating a map was a matter of changing the symbology and description to what I desired (in this case, the forested land classification and area) and adding the essential map elements. Below is my map.

This is a map of some forested lands in Washington state, which displays the various forested land type classifications and the area in hectares. The vegetation is displayed in various shades of green, the bare ground and clouds in beige shades, and water in blue.