Data location: ~arsf/arsf_data/2009/flight_data/uk/GB09_07-2009_132_West_coast

Data arrived from ARSF via SATA disk on 19/May/2009.

Scientific details: plant distribution on dune fields.

Priority: α4L

PI: Andreas Baas

Sensors:

• Eagle (07/12/09)
• Hawk (07/12/09)
• Leica LIDAR (28/10/2009)
• Digital Photography (15/01/2010)

We need a small tool for adding tags (small text/numerical elements) to TIFF image files.

The pre 2009 aerial photos contain metadata inserted by a scanning company. You can see what's in the 2008 photos by doing something like tiffinfo ~arsf/arsf_data/2008/flight_data/uk/GB08_18-2008_176a_River_Frome/photography/08_03_8190.tif | less.

Mostly they seem to have created an XML metadata section. Many of their tags relate to the scanning process and are not relevant. Ideally we should duplicate the XML metadata in addition to putting data into relevant tags.

There are a large number of defined tags and a mechanism for picking "free" tags. I'd suggest trying to conform to the EXIF standard where possible.

​http://www.awaresystems.be/imaging/tiff/tifftags.html

• for the exif bit, see private ifd tags -> exif, or look at ​http://www.exif.org/

For example, there are predefined tags for GPS location that we may wish to use as that'd mean the images could be correctly geolocated in a standard package.

• ​http://www.awaresystems.be/imaging/tiff/tifftags/privateifd/gps/gpsareainformation.html

There are also some bits for descriptions and comments, which could be used for the project info.. Alternatively, you could pick one of the "free" ranges and make up your own tag. Before making up your own tag, please a) check for a standard one and b) check what the 2008 photos did.

Suggested approach:

• review EXIF / TIFF tag documents to familarise yourself with the standard tags
• identify suitable tools / libraries for working with TIFF tags (google "python tiff tag" or "python exif"?)
• duplicate the XML metadata in a 2008 photo for a 2009 one
• insert the XML metadata into a 2009 TIFF
• insert EXIF standard additional tags (particularly geolocation ones) into the 2009 TIFF

People at RSPSoc strongly expressed a wish to have orthorectified photos. This is a huge chunk of work and very manual to do the full process using the Leica workflow. Other workflows may improve this, e.g.

• azgcorr
• Susan Conway suggested ​http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOCET_SET and

similar helped a lot

• John Stevenson managed some of this with GRASS

ARSF-DAN agreed to investigate this as a background, low priority task. In particular, it may be worth considering a halfway house (tiepointing & colocating, which can be automatically done, but not seamlining, which is intensively manual at present).