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University of Iowa
Iowa State University & US Department of Agriculture Case Study: Atalasoft DotTwain Facilitates Implementation of Remote Sensing Survey Application
Iowa State University's Center for Survey Statistics and Methodology (CSSM) collaborates with the USDA on an agricultural survey called the National Resources Inventory (NRI). The survey is conducted via interpretation of aerial photographs. To streamline the scanning and consistent naming of thousands of aerial photographs, developers at CSSM chose to write a custom scanning application leveraging the .NET Framework to build the app quickly and efficiently.
Lead developer Andrew Vardeman elaborates: "Atalasoft DotTwain was key to getting NRI Scan out the door in a reasonable time frame. DotTwain was the simplest and most .NET-like of the TWAIN libraries we found. Two easy-to-use classes, Acquisition and Device, provided intuitive access to TWAIN's features while hiding the internal complexities of the TWAIN API. Thanks to DotTwain, the TWAIN-related code of our final, production-quality application was on the order of 100 lines. This was sufficient to enumerate and select drivers, open a device, query and set scanning properties, scan to a .NET Image object, and handle device events and TWAIN errors.
This specific implementation of DotTwain pre-populates some scan settings: DPI, color depth, and media type for the scanning of 9x9 color positives). After scanning, the image is inspected by using the small overview to navigate the full-sized image. The remote sensing lab staff can then check to make sure the fiducial marks burned into the image are clearly visible, since they are critical for orthorectification (removing camera distortion and parallax effects to make the image map-accurate).
Atalasoft’s service also played a part in this project as Vardeman recounts: "We had one support question during development that we posted to the Atalasoft forums. Within the day, we had a helpful response from an Atalasoft developer. The developer worked with us to help us identify the problem and fix our code. The application is nearly ready for release, less than a month after it was conceptualized.