Create Product Sequence Wizard

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The Create Product Sequence Wizard is designed to turbocharge your productivity and make it easy to create, edit, and recreate temporal sequence products. It automates what would otherwise be a manual product creation and editing process. 

Access the Create Product Sequence Wizard from the Product Database drop-menu button. 

The goal of the wizard is to make it easy to set up, extend, and modify long baseline studies of spectral indices computed for polygonal regions. You can use the wizard to create the following kinds of products – 

• Scene Sequence

A product with spatial coverage that is limited to a single scene or tile. Multiple acquisitions of this tile are combined in chronological order into a sequence. 

• Mosaic Sequence

A product with spatial coverage that usually covers multiple scenes or tiles. Multiple acquisitions of these tiles are combined in chronological order into a sequence. 

• Collated Scene Sequence

A product with spatial coverage that is limited to a single scene or tile. Multiple acquisitions of this tile are combined in chronological order into a sequence. At each temporal event in the sequence, multiple acquisitions of the tile are combined by masking poor-quality pixels and retaining high-quality pixels. 

• Collated Mosaic Sequence

A product with spatial coverage that usually covers multiple scenes or tiles. Multiple acquisitions of these tiles are combined in chronological order into a sequence. At each temporal event in the sequence, multiple acquisitions of the tile are combined by masking poor-quality pixels and retaining high-quality pixels. 

When you run the wizard, your input parameters are saved to a script that you can reuse and edit at any time in the future. You must give each script a unique name. You can create new scripts or edit, clone, and delete scripts from within the wizard. You can also delete all scripts and wizard report files from the MSS Options dialog. 

On the “Script” page you need to select the script that you wish to edit. This may be an existing script, a script that you have made a copy of (cloned), or a new script. 

A list of existing scripts is displayed in the script drop list. Use the buttons to the right of the drop list to add a new script, delete the selected script, or clone the selected script. 

The name of the script is shown below the script drop list. Each script must have a unique name. If the name you have chosen for your script is unique, you will see a green tick. If it is not unique, you will see a red exclamation mark. Edit the name of the script to ensure it is unique and either hit ‘return’ or click the button to assign the name to the script. 

When you run the wizard for the first time, there will be no script or name displayed. Hit the blue button to add a new script, then modify the name as you please. 

Depending on your choices on this page, the wizard may execute in one of three modes. 

1. Create mode. 

A new script is created with default properties. You will be required to correctly define all properties. When executed, new products are generated. 

2. Clone mode. 

A new script is created with properties copied from an existing script. You can change any properties. When executed, new products are generated. 

3. Edit mode. 

An existing script is edited. You can change most properties. When executed, intermediate products from the prior execution are deleted and new intermediate products are created. The final sequence product is modified but not recreated. Any processing operations associated with the product are retained. 

The inputs to a scene sequence product are a list of scene assembly virtual rasters. There are no intermediate products. The inputs to all other sequence products are a list of intermediate products. For example, if you create a mosaic sequence then your inputs will be mosaic products. These are referred to as intermediate products. The final sequence product is referred to as the final product. The wizard will create both the intermediate and the final products. 

When you edit an existing script, you are electing to re-run the wizard using modified parameters. The intermediate products that were generated by the earlier run are deleted from the product database and the final product is modified. Any additional processing operations you have previously defined for your final product will be preserved. 

On the “Scene Database” page, select the scene database that will be the source for all scenes in the final product.  

On the “MSS” page you will begin to define a query that will select scenes from the scene database that you have chosen. 

You will only be given options that are represented by scenes in the database. For example, if there are no Landsat scenes in the database then no Landsat platform options will be presented. As you make selections, the number of available subordinate selections will become restricted by availability. 

Firstly, select the satellite platform. It follows that only scenes from one platform can be used in a product. 

Then, specify whether you want to target a specific bird, or all the birds within a family. Birds within a family are known to be compatible and so can be combined into products. 

Select the processing level and the spectral product (for example Bottom of Atmosphere (BOA), Top of atmosphere (TOA), or Uncorrected (Raw). 

On the “Product” page define what kind of sequence product you want to produce. You can select a Scene Sequence, Mosaic Sequence, Collated Scene Sequence, or Collated Mosaic Sequence. 

Regardless of what kind of product you are creating, you must now refine the scene query by declaring what scenes you wish to use. In the wizard, these are referred to as tiles which is a more general term encompassing scenes (a full image capture) and tiles (a clipped partial image capture). 

Specify the tiles by entering a string of comma-delimited Tile IDs. For example, for Landsat, you might have a string like “99-80,99-79,98-80,98-79”. In this case, the Tile ID is a mashup of the path and row numbers. For Sentinel2 you might have a string like “04QHJ,04QHH,04QGJ,04QGH”. In this case, the Tile ID matches the Sentinel2 tile delivery system. 

You can find the Tile IDs in the multispectral scene database browser spreadsheet. If you select one or more scenes in the browser and then right-click, you will be given an option to copy the Tile IDs to the clipboard. It is a good idea to use a text editor to construct your Tile ID string in this way, and then copy the final string into the wizard. You can do the same thing in the multispectral product database browser. This is a more useful option as all the Tile IDs used in mosaics will be copied to the clipboard. 

For mosaic products or products that use collation, you must also specify a rule that defines the order in which tiles are assigned to each sequence event. For example, in a mosaic you will have multiple tiles in each event that may partially overlap. It is common to order these by cloud coverage so that the least cloudy tiles are on top and overlap the cloudier tiles. When you are collating you will likely have multiple revisits of each tile. In this case, it is common to sort by temporal proximity to the sequence event date. This ensures that high-quality data that is closest to the event data is used in preference to data that is more temporally distant from the event date. 

When collating, you must also select a band to use for masking. This is used to mask out low-quality pixels – for example, pixels that are affected by cloud – so that high-quality pixels acquired at a different time can be used instead. 

On the “Time” page you will specify the rules that determine how many sequence events the wizard will generate, the time of those events, and how tiles will be attributed to each of those events. 

The wizard will interrogate the scene database and compile a list of all tiles in the database that match the query you defined in the previous pages. These are presented in two drop lists, sorted by acquisition time. 

Select the first and last tile you want included in the product. For convenience, you can use the “Earliest Time” and “Latest Time” options to automatically select the appropriate tiles. This can be useful if you acquire more scenes and rerun the wizard later to update the product. If you are creating a Scene Sequence product, there will be no other properties to define. In this case, each tile becomes an event in the sequence. 

From the tile acquisition times, the wizard will attempt to define a set of acquisition events. To shape this process, you can define the maximum time span of an acquisition event (the acquisition period). For some mosaics, acquisition events may be clearly detectable and useful for defining the sequence event times. For others, they may be of little or no use. 

Next, define the rule that establishes the sequence event times. The wizard will create an intermediate product for each sequence event – these can be thought of as frames in a movie. For some mosaics, you can use the acquisition events. If this is not a suitable approach, you must define a regular event schedule. The “Daily Interval” schedule uses the time of the first tile, and then generates a new event every day (or less frequently, determined by the interval) until the event time exceeds the time of the last event. The “Schedule (days in each month)” option will generate events on specific dates in each month. Specify the days as comma-delimited numbers from 1 to 31. For example, “1,16” would generate an event at the beginning of each month and in the middle of each month. The final option is “Schedule (days in each year)” which is similar, except that the days are counted from the beginning of the year. For example, “1,92,183,274” would generate events quarterly throughout the year. 

The wizard must determine which tiles are assigned to each event. A tile may be assigned to multiple different events (this is common when collating). You can define a time “Spread” ranging from before the event time to after the event time. This spread can be specified as a number of acquisitions or as days. For example, if you are scheduling events in the middle of every month, then you might define the spread as being 16 days before the event and 16 days after it, capturing all the tile data acquired over the course of that month. 

On the “Product Database” page you can select the multispectral product database to target. All the intermediate products and the final product will be written into this dataset. 

You can elect to create a new product database if you wish – just hit the blue add button and define the new database name. 

If you are editing an existing script, you must target the same product database as was targeted in the previous run. This is automatically selected and not editable. 

When you click “Finish” the wizard will execute. This will usually only take a few moments. A small dialog will open reporting whether the wizard succeeded or failed. Regardless of the outcome, you should then hit the “View Report…” button to review the report generated by the wizard. This is a simple ASCII text file and will open in your default text file editor. The report file will be written into the C:\Users\<YourUserName>\RGE\ProRaster Scientific folder. You can delete them manually as you see fit. Alternatively, if you delete all wizard scripts via the MSS Options dialog, then all reports are deleted at the same time. 

If the wizard completes successfully, you should hit the “Edit Product…” button to open a product editor dialog for the final sequence product. You can use the editor to review the product and render it and begin your analysis. 

If you have run the wizard in “Edit Mode” then any existing operations in the product operation cascade will now require updating. When you hit “Edit Product…” to open the product editor, the system will automatically trigger an update. If there are existing operations that compute statistics or export rasters, this update may take time to execute. 

If you hit the “Done” button to exit, you will need to trigger a manual update of the product in the product editor later. This is critical. If you do not do this then all products in the processing cascade will be invalid. You can trigger this update manually by right-clicking on the top item in the tree control and selecting “Execute Operation”. The whole product cascade will then be updated.