Project Objectives

Availability of good software for teaching Remote Sensing and GIS has always been a problem. Commercial software, no matter how good a discount is offered, remains expensive for a developing country, cannot be distributed to students, and may not be appropriate for education. Home-grown and university-sourced software lacks long-term support and the needed usability and robustness engineering.

The OpenDragon Project was established in the Department of Computer Engineering of KMUTT in December of 2004. The primary objective of this project is to develop, enhance, and maintain a high-quality, commercial-grade software package for remote sensing and GIS analysis that can be distributed free to educational organizations within Thailand. This package, OpenDragon, is based on the Version 5 of the commercial Dragon/ips^® software developed and marketed by Goldin-Rudahl Systems, Inc.

As of 2010, Goldin-Rudahl Systems has agreed that the Open Dragon software, based on Dragon version 5, will be open source for non-commercial use. The software source code should be available on this server by early 2011.

OpenDragon provides:

• Intuitive, easy-to-use desktop image processing for the study for remote sensing techniques and applications;
• Access to optimized source code for the study of image processing software development techniques;
• A test bed for students and researchers to explore novel image processing methods.

An additional goal of this project is to raise awareness of geoinformatics principles and applications at KMUTT and particularly within the Department of Computer Engineering. This increased awareness is expected to enhance faculty and student research on geoinformatics topics, to foster the development of collaborations with other departments within KMUTT as well as outside organizations, including educational, government, and non-governmental organizations, and to raise KMUTT's profile in the geoinformatics community.

The OpenDragon Project is actively seeking support from additional sponsors in order to pay ongoing expenses and to expand the software capabilities.