viz. - Remote Sensing

Iranian Nuclear Facility Photo & Interpretation

Nate Kreuter — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:30:08 +0000

This morning I received an automatic update message from Imaging Notes, a remote sensing (satellite imaging) trade magazine. The lead-off story was about one of the alleged nuclear material refining facilities in Iran.

The image, and the annotations provided by a private company, are eerily similar to those Colin Powell used in his February, 2003 speech to the UN when he argued on behalf of the doctrine of pre-emptive war in Iraq. I point all of this out not to question the interpretation of the Iranian image, but simply to point out that as lay-people and citizens, we do not have the means to engage with the arguments presented in such images, but must take or refuse their content based with only our trust or mistrust in the party providing the image to guide us.

Remote Sensing and the Obama Inauguration

Nate Kreuter — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:35:03 +0000

Much was made of the crowds that attended President Obama's inauguration in Washington, DC last week.

As evidence of remote sensing's (that is, satellite image's) greater role in public consciousness, check out this image of the crowds gathered for the historic moment, shot at one-half meter resolution. (One-half, or.5, meter resolution means, more or less, that the smallest units discernible in the image are .5 x .5 meters, about the size of a person from above. The resolution is roughly equivalent on the NIIRS scale, which is the military/intelligence community's rating scale for remotely sensed image interpretability.)

Increasingly news organizations are citing remotely sensed images in their reporting. Whether this is a techno-fad or provides a legitimately new and informative perspective on events, I'd be curious to hear readers' opinions on.

Image courtesy of GeoEye (click link for a larger resolution photo, as well as additional remotely sensed images)

Remote Sensing, Logos Images and the Irony of Evidence

Nate Kreuter — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 14:21:53 +0000

My take on visual rhetoric is largely informed by my prior career with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. In the UT Visual Rhetoric Presentation I have a slide that depicts a photo from the Cuban Missile Crisis alongside a picture from Colin Powell's Presentation to the UN. The pictures are embedded below. I like to make the point that even though these two photos are remotely sensed, captured by a U2 spy plane and a satellite, respectively, and show raw data, presumably objective data, the pictures are hardly objective.

Because so few of us are trained military imagery analysts there is a real irony in presenting such photos to the public as evidence, for none of us can verify the contents independently. Who among us has ever seen a "Sanitized Chemical Munitions Bunker" or a "Missile-Ready Tent"? Our readings of these logos-driven, data-intensive images is entirely dependent on the government's readings of the images. They got it right in the Cuban case forty years ago, and wrong in the Iraq case four years ago.

Two very cool sites on remote sensing are hosted by the two largest US remote sensing companies, GeoEye and DigitalGlobe.