DEFENSE

NGA Evaluation Indicates Substantial Time Savings and Accuracy

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) of the U.S. Department of Defense, published the results of its Feature Analyst® study in May 2003.

As part of its accelerated feature extraction (AFE) evaluation program, NGA sent a team of analysts to Missoula, Mont., home of Visual Learning Systems, for a week-long comprehensive test of Feature Analyst.

"The extraction of land cover and drainage features was performed approximately five times faster with Feature Analyst than with a standard manual extraction system," said Michael O'Brien, Program Manager for the Synergistic Targeting Auto-extraction Registration (STAR) Program at NGA.

The NGA study concluded, "While the objective testing concentrated on relatively small scenes, a review of the Feature Analyst software's performance over larger regions suggests that the potential time savings in a production setting could be as much as a factor of 100."

O'Brien called the results, "impressive, demonstrating both good accuracy and substantial time savings compared to manual extraction methods."

O'Brien, Michael. Feature Extraction with the VLS Feature Analyst System. ASPRS International Conference, 2003.

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