Case study

Streaming National Maps as a Service to India
As the seventh largest country in the world by area,
India boasts an extremely diverse landscape. Fromthe Himalayan mountains, the Indo-Gangetic Plain,
and the Thar Desert to Indian Ocean coastlines anddensely populated cities along India’s three major rivers,
providing maps and geospatial data for such varied
geographical regions presents a tremendous challenge.
National Informatics Centre (NIC) provides map services
to the national government of India and different
departments of state governments across the country.

NIC has been a lead developer of e-Governanceapplications for the Government of India, down tothe grassroots level, as well as a promoter of digital
opportunities for sustainable development for thecountry. Through its ICT Network, NICNET, NIC has
institutional linkages with all the Ministries andDepartments of the Central Government, 37 State
Governments and Union Territories, and about 720
District Administrations in India.

Taking a National GIS Framework to theNext Level
To support the Indian government’s Digital India initiativeto transform the country to a digitally empowered
society, NIC sought to create a national image webservice of natural color products and imagery.
Previously, NIC developed a National GIS Frameworkat 1:50,000 scale for planning, decision-making ande-governance projects for planning commissioning. Due
to limitations of content, the existing GIS framework was
proposed to be upgraded at a scale of 1:10,000.
NIC wanted to incorporate high-resolution standard
datasets of the country’s Indian Remote Sensing satellite
sensors (IRS), in particular Cartosat-1 and Resourcesat-2
satellites, for a project “Up-scaling of Multilayer GIS
framework,” which aims at upgrading NIC’s existingbasemap services to 1:10,000 scale for both street map
and satellite data services.
At present, many Indian GIS applications are unable toprovide the Indian satellite data as basemaps. So, the GIS
applications have been incorporating commercial maps
in their backdrops, which is against the Government ofIndia’s Remote Sensing Data Policy of 2011.

2

By developing a national image service, NIC can ensurethat Indian GIS applications will consume a national
service in any e-gov application in a secured environment,
help agencies to better understand the topography of anarea for improved planning and better utilization of theresources available, and provide an image service thatadheres to Remote Sensing Data Policy of 2011 and avoids
dependence on commercial services.

Preparing Imagery for a National Basemap
To prepare the country-wide basemap, high-resolution
satellite imagery of the entire country were captured tousing Cartosat-1 and the LISS-IV camera on board theResourcesat-2 satellite. The project intended to use
satellite imagery to enrich the content of existing roadand rail networks, rivers, bridges, large power stations,helipads, water bodies, settlements, built-up areas,forests, communication lines, and more.
Approximately 7,500 Cartosat scenes of resolution 2.5
meter and 1,200 LISS scenes of resolution 5.0 meter wereprocured. These scenes were individually georeferenced
with the available external global services using ERDASIMAGINE® Expansion Pack tools.

The high-resolution Cartosat scenes are panchromatic(greyscale), and the lower-resolution LISS scenes are multispectral, meaning they contain different spectral bands
that produce what is known as false color. However, toaccurately interpret and use geodata, non-remote sensingprofessionals need the data to have its natural color.
By using pan sharpening techniques and ERDAS IMAGINE’s
Natural color tool, NIC merged Cartosat scenes and LISS
scenes together to create natural color imagery product byadding a synthesized/artificial blue band to the image.
Then these natural color composite (NCC) images weremosaicked and pan-sharpened to create the statewide
NCCs across India. These mosaics were later joined tocreate a single seamless NCC mosaic image of the entire
country of India.

Development of Pan-Sharpened Image

Streaming National Maps as a Service to India3

Development of Natural Color Composite Image

NIC is making maps as a service available to the usercommunity, which is quite exciting. Through this we are
geo-enabling various digital platforms developed by NIC
for ministries and state government departments.”
Vishnu Chandra
Deputy Director General of India’s National Informatics Centre (NIC)

Efficiently Serving Imagery Over the Web
Considering the massive size of the high-resolution NCC data
created for the entire country, it is necessary to convert it toa format that can be efficiently published and served over theweb without compromising data quality and performance. The
size of a natural color product corresponding to one Cartosat-1
scene is 1.2 TB approximately, and there are approximately
7,500 scenes across India. 9,000 terabytes (9 petabytes) worthof uncompressed images would be very difficult to efficiently
stream across the web.

NIC needed to choose a file format that could
drastically reduce the size of images to enable
fast streaming without compromising on the visualquality of data. Enhanced Compression Wavelet(ECW), the proprietary wavelet compression format
from Hexagon, has been optimized for satelliteimagery. ECW can compress imagery more than ten
times of the original size, while remaining visually
lossless. Its delivery has been benchmarked as theindustry’s fastest.
NIC created an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)compliant WMS service that streams ECW imagery
using ERDAS APOLLO software, serving terabytes
of data to thousands of concurrent users. This
fast imagery serving delivers the best experiencefor end users, and the streaming capability allows
for the best performance in areas with poor
network bandwidth.

Single Seamless NCC Mosaic Image of the Entire Country of India

Streaming National Maps as a Service to India

5National Basemap Available on the Web toMultiple Agencies
The country-wide NCC mosaic images were published as
an OGC-compliant map service to BharatMaps, part of theNational Portal of Map Services of India. BharatMaps is an
integrated basemap service using 1:50,000 scale reference
data from Survey of India, Indian Space Research
Organisation (ISRO), Forest Survey of India (FSI), Registrar
General and Census Commissioner of India (RGI) andother agencies. This encompasses 23 layers containing
administrative boundaries, road and railway networks,
forest layers, settlement locations, and more.
The map service has been developed in-country using
Hexagon’s image processing tools in ERDAS IMAGINE, andimage web serving technology in ERDAS APOLLO.

These layers have been updated to 1:10,000 scale. Hence,
the basemap services developed through these mosaics
helped in creating a basemap with improved accuracy. The
service is being used in various e-government applications
such as banking, agriculture, transportation, and others.

6Streaming National Maps as a Service to India

Benefits of the map service include:•5 TB of country-wide high resolution IRS satellitedata service (NCC service of Cartosat-1) isefficiently and seamlessly served over the web.

•An OGC-compliant service ensures interoperability
and ease of integration in e-governance applicationof various ministries and departments forvisualization, validation, and 1:10,000 scale mappingof GIS data.

•Encourages the use of Indian satellite data services
instead of commercial services. Using datafrom domestic sources helps with analyzing thechallenges of developing and serving of world-classhigh-resolution data.

Conclusion

Products Used

With this fully developed national image web service inplace, state governments and departments across India
have access to seamless country-wide basemaps renderedwith impressive speed, topographic maps, satellite images,
and hybrid maps, all aligned to global geospatial standards.
As an essential component of Digital India campaign,
this national image web service provides citizens withelectronic delivery of services for better planning andgood governance.

ECW Compression
ERDAS IMAGINEERDAS IMAGINE Expansion PackERDAS APOLLO

It has been a herculean task to align 5 TB of satellite datato develop a seamless, OGC-compliant, all-India NaturalColor Composite image service of very high resolution
effortlessly on Web using file compression techniques.”
Dr. Vijay Veer
Scientist ‘F’Streaming National Maps as a Service to India

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