Free and easy access to the latest high-quality Sentinel-2 imagery from ESA and Landsat-8 imagery from NASA/USGS has made Earth Observation in the early 21st century even more exciting. The new imagery promises enormous opportunities for innovation and applications.

While the imagery source is great, easy-to-use, advanced and affordable image analysis tools are always demanded by not only geospatial professionals but also the broad general public.

GeoSage team has just released Spectral Transformer for Sentinel-2 Imagery, a dedicate software tool able to easily and rapidly perform some most common and important image analysis steps, including:

Step 1: Handy band combinations

Step 2: Adaptive linear and non-linear image stretching to make colourful imagery composites

Step 3: Advanced and fast image pan-sharpening to make colourful and spatially sharper composites

Step 4: Exploratory image feature extraction with image feature indices (e.g. NDVI and NDWI) and band ratios

All analysed outputs are in GeoTIFF format, ready to be used by all GIS and remote sensing software, and Google Earth Pro.

The software website http://www.GeoSage.com provides detailed information on how to quickly download and analyse the Sentinel-2 imagery. Some interesting comparisons between Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 are also included. Processed sample imagery (at 10m-resolution) for six cities – San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, cape Town, Beijing and Perth – can be downloaded and evaluated.

Multispectral, wide-swath Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 satellite images are highly complementary to high-resolution imaging; for a few applications (e.g. those using short-wave infrared, SWIR, imagery fused at a sharp 10m resolution), they are even competitive to some commercial offerings.