Mod 1: Visual Interpretation Lab

 This week's lab introduced us to the basics of aerial photography including methods and techniques to interpret an image. Aerial photography often involves taking high-resolution images from satellites, planes, drones, or balloons above the earth's surface to map, survey, or monitor the environment for changes over time. Below are some of the maps we worked with over this lab.

This map includes recognition elements using tone and texture. The yellow outlined areas represent various tones such as very dark, dark, medium, light, and very light. When mapping tone it is important to note areas that are uniformed in those colors and stand out. Whereas the red outlined above shows various textures such as very coarse, coarse, mottled, fine, and very fine. As you may note from the map the very fine areas are shown in the water areas while the very coarse areas are buildings, specifically housing.

For this part of this week's exercise, we were provided an aerial image in both true color and false color and were tasked with creating five different features within the map and noting how we were able to identify them using four characteristics of imagery (Association to other objects or features, Pattern, Shadows, and Shape/Size). The color of the point indicates what technique was used to make the determination, please see the legend. Each point has the name of the feature next to the point.