Spatial referencing (referred to as geo-referencing as well) is the process of aligning available EO or GIS data to a coordinate system so that further spatial analysis and image analysis tasks can be applied using these data as input. To be able to perform spatial referencing, users have to generate the so called Ground Control Points (GCPs) with known coordinates. In case of images, the easiest features that could be used as GCPs are the intersections, isolated trees etc.
Need for checking relationships / redundancies with other BoK concepts; References need to be checked.
Synonym: Georeferencing
Previous text used to be:
The act of spatial referencing assigns the representation of a spatial phenomenon to a location on the Earth surface. Therefore, information about the position is needed. Position information for the pixels in remotely sensed images uses numerical coordinates because most other types of spatial referencing are not applicable, such as addresses with postal code and street number (Laurini and Thompson 1992). However, as remote sensing technologies advance, spatial indexing systems for the globe may become more relevant in the future (Ben etal. 2010).
Create a set of ground control points tying image coordinates to map coordinates of a reference dataset using a digital reference dataset or in-situ GPS measurements
Transform an EO dataset to map coordinates using a registered image of like geometry as a reference
Planned