Geo-based image blending in a mobile cloud environment

Abstract

Mobile cloud computing and its services are regarded as one of the major trends in information communication technology. However, there are only few cases of mobile cloud application for geo-based data processing, including space-borne imaging. The development of the Web graphic library (WebGL) is an important development for geospatial mobile computing because it supports 3D graphic processing in a Web browser without plug-in modules. It also provides useful functions for geo-based data analysis. A common geospatial application for processing multiple data sets is geo-data fusion. Such technical functions are the motivation for this work, with the three topics of mobile cloud service, WebGL image blending scheme, and intensity hue saturation (IHS) fusion converged into an integrated model. In this letter, mobile applications with test data sets including optical satellite images, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image, and gridded air-quality data sets are presented for a tablet platform, run on Android, and linked with cloud computing capabilities in the Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Professor Tim Warner and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable and constructive comments.