When you think of Definiens you may think Enterprise Image Intelligence, or perhaps you might think of eCognition, but would you think Nobel Prize Winner? Perhaps you should! This spotlight feature will serve to introduce you to all the concepts I just mentioned including eCognition, the brand; Definiens Developer, the solution; and Definiens the company, founded by Nobel prize winner. The technology emulates human cognitive processes,extracting intelligence from images. The technology works with all modern remote sensing instruments including SAR, Lidar,panchromatic, multispectral and hyperspectral sensors mounted on satellite and aerial platforms.
Background... Nobel Prize winner takes on Image Analysis Challenge
Since 1994, Nobel Laureate Gerd Binnig and a team of image analysis experts at Definiens have been perfecting an entirely new and revolutionary approach to image analysis. Highly regarded for its ability to emulate human cognitive processes, Definiens Cognition Network Technology® has helped thousands of researchers and commercial enterprises to automate their own analytic approaches to extract meaningful, context-specific intelligence from any type of data.
About Gerd Binning
In 1986 Prof. Binnig, along with his colleague Prof. Heinrich Rohrer, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in scanning tunneling microscopy. Prof. Binnig and Prof. Rohrer were recognized for developing the powerful microscopy technique, which can form an image of individual atoms on a metal or semiconductor surface by scanning the tip of a needle over the surface at a height of only a few atomic diameters.
Born in Frankfurt, Germany, Prof. Binnig studied at the J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1973 and his doctorate degree in 1978. That year he joined a physics research group at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory. Prof. Binnig was assigned to IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif. from 1985 to 1986, and was a visiting professor at Stanford University from 1987 to 1988.
Definiens - the “eCognition” company
eCognition is a relatively well known brand within the Earth Sciences community, however, it is only recently that the connection between Definiens and eCognition has become commonly known. eCognition is, and always has been, a product of the same company started by Gerd Binning back in 1994. Today the eCognition brand is still alive and well, however since the number of client applications offered by Definiens has expanded, the eCognition brand is used in the context of the main server engines and the underlying technology rather the name for a specific client application.
Definiens founder featured on cover of Forbes Magazine
Today... Definiens Developer
Definiens Developer is eCognition for today’s Earth Observation Market The product most discussed today is Definiens Developer: a powerful integrated development environment designed for the image analysis challenges facing the earth observation and remote sensing community. It facilitates and accelerates the development of a vast range of image analysis applications, allowing users to identify the image objects and the relations between those objects on multiple levels.
In combination with the Definiens eCognition Server, Developer can be extended to a client server based production environment, capable of processing terrabytes of data in a fully automatic manner. The provided software development kit allows both extending the Definiens technology and integrating it smoothly in the user workflow.
The technology examines pixels not in isolation, but in context. It builds up a picture iteratively,recognizing groups of pixels as objects. Just like the human mind, it uses the color,shape,texture and size of objects,as well as their context and relationships to draw the same conclusions and inferences that an experienced analyst would draw. The result is the world’s leading solution for fast, accurate geo-spatial information extraction from any kind of remote sensing imagery.
Understanding Images...
This technology has been used to achieve exciting new research breakthroughs and deliver new commercial services in areas such as thematic-based mapping, change detection, and feature extraction. The technology works with all modern remote sensing instruments including SAR, Lidar, panchromatic, multispectral and hyperspectral sensors mounted on satellite and aerial platforms. The technology supports enterprises and organizations all along the value chain – data providers, service providers and end users. It provides the vital bridge between Earth Observation and remote sensing on the one hand and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) on the other.
For example, looking at a satellite image, it is easy, even for an untrained eye, to distinguish a river from a lake. But traditional automated image classification tools most often fail to recognize features that are obvious to any person. Why? Because they only use information contained within individual pixels and their immediate neighbors. Definiens delivers technology which harnesses the inherent human capacity for image analysis and combines it with scalable computing power to create entirely new possibilities in infrastructure planning, natural resource management, security and emergency response.
When you think of Definiens you may think Enterprise Image Intelligence, or perhaps you might think of eCognition, but would you think Nobel Prize Winner? Perhaps you should! This spotlight feature will serve to introduce you to all the concepts I just mentioned including eCognition, the brand; Definiens Developer, the solution; and Definiens the company, founded by Nobel prize winner. The technology emulates human cognitive processes,extracting intelligence from images. The technology works with all modern remote sensing instruments including SAR, Lidar,panchromatic, multispectral and hyperspectral sensors mounted on satellite and aerial platforms. 
In 1986 Prof. Binnig, along with his colleague Prof. Heinrich Rohrer, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in scanning tunneling microscopy. Prof. Binnig and Prof. Rohrer were recognized for developing the powerful microscopy technique, which can form an image of individual atoms on a metal or semiconductor surface by scanning the tip of a needle over the surface at a height of only a few atomic diameters.
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