Strategic Education Alliance Agreement with Stellenbosch University

MARKHAM, Ontario, Canada - August 8, 2017: PCI Geomatics, a world-leading developer of remote sensing and photogrammetric software and systems, announced today it has extended a Strategic Education Alliance Agreement with Stellenbosch University (SU) for another year.

Now entering its second year, this agreement recognizes SU as the sole PCI Technology Centre of Excellence in Remote Sensing and Geomatics in South Africa. Under the terms of the agreement, the collaboration allows for the advancement of PCI geospatial research, development, and training within SU, leading to increased commercial acceptance and uptake of applied research, as well as promoting skilled practitioners, application developers and technicians of PCI Geomatics technology and within SU.

PCI’s desktop software suite, Geomatica, is widely used during the teaching and training of the professionally accredited qualification of GeoInformatics at SU. PCI OrthoEngine is used exclusively during the teaching of the second-year GIT 242 Digital Photogrammetry module (24 students in 2016). All image pre-processing in the third-year GIT 342 Advanced Earth Observation module (35 students in 2016) is done using PCI Focus. Consequently, the majority of students who continue with their studies in GeoInformatics (Honours, Masters, PhD, Post-Doc), use PCI software in their research.

The Centre for Geographical Analysis (CGA) at SU also offers a range of short (one-week) courses to individuals in the industry who cannot register for the full-time SU GeoInformatics programmes. PCI Geomatica is used in the majority of image pre-processing training in both the Introduction to Earth Observation and the Geographical Object Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) courses. Both courses were offered in 2016 and were well attended.

The CGA also undertakes research and development (R&D) in GIS, satellite remote sensing and geographical analytical techniques. Three focus areas of R&D include the development of automated pre-processing of satellite imagery, automated digital surface model (DSM) extraction from aerial and satellite photogrammetry, and DSM to digital terrain model (DTM) conversion. PCI software is heavily utilized in all three areas, with the CGA providing ongoing feedback, bug reports and suggestions for improvements to the developers of the PCI software.