You display imagery and raster data within your GIS maps and views. Imagery is most commonly created from sensors carried on satellites and aircraft.
Imagery sources are also generated and displayed as the results of numerous analytical models—for example, generating a detailed digital elevation model from a terrain dataset or calculating a weighted overlay for analysis.
Useful links for image display
- You often start by adding imagery to a map document in ArcMap or a 3D display in ArcScene or ArcGlobe. For more information on mapping and visualizating imagery in ArcGIS, see Displaying Rasters.
- Increasingly, you are deploying image services using ArcGIS Server on the web. This makes it easy to open up access to your image data and to openly serve imagery using XML SOAP, REST, WMS, and WCS.
Display quality and appearance
You can change the appearance of imagery by changing the display properties, such as:
- Defining band combinations
- Picking the right renderer
- Stretching the histogram
- Adjusting brightness and contrast
- Applying color balancing
- Pan sharpening
Display performance
Imagery can take a lot of resources and time to display as it generally involves very large amounts of data. Several techniques such as pyramid building, statistics, resampling, and compression exist to increase the performance of its display. In addition, optimizing techniques exist for imagery and surface data rendering in a 3D environment.