Teaching Resources
Whitebox has been used successfully for teaching various geomatics related undergraduate and graduate level courses. The listing of laboratory assignments below have been used for teaching 2nd and 3rd year Geomatics courses at the University of Guelph. These exercises were developed with the version of Whitebox that was current at the time of offering. It is therefore important to know that the exercises may refer to past procedures and features that are no longer reflective of the most current version of the software. I will make an effort to update materials as opportunities arise. Nonetheless, these resources give a good indication of the types of concepts and skills Whitebox can be used to develop in an educational setting.
Obviously the assignments emphasize the application of Whitebox to the fields of remote sensing and photogrammetry rather than GIS. This is reflective of my own teaching assignments and not the capabilities of Whitebox. In fact, Whitebox is widely used for GIS instruction worldwide, I simply haven't had an excuse to do this myself.
If you have a series of GIS exercises using Whitebox GAT that you would be willing to share, or if you have used the software for teaching and would like to share your experiences, please contact John Lindsay (jlindsay@uoguelph.ca).
GEOG2420 The Earth From Space†
An introduction to remote sensing and photogrammetry
The following lab assignments were used in GEOG2420 The Earth From Space (Fall 2015):
GEOG2420 Laboratory Exercise 1 (Lab1Data.zip 145 MB)
An introduction to Whitebox and geospatial data sources.GEOG2420 Laboratory Exercise 2 (Lab2Data.zip 29 MB)
Introduces the concepts of image scale and resolution.GEOG2420 Laboratory Exercise 3 (Lab3Data.zip 93 MB)
Digitizing fiducial marks, locating the principal point, image cropping, de-striping, anti-vignetting filtering.GEOG2420 Laboratory Exercise 4 (Lab4Data.zip 36 MB)
Creating a seamless photomosaic.GEOG2420 Laboratory Exercise 5 (Lab5Data.zip 32 MB)
Measuring heights from digital aerial photographs. Note, the techniques used in this lab are intended for illustrative purposes only and are not meant for the creation of highly accurate DEMs.
GEOG3420 Remote Sensing of The Environment†
An applications of remote sensing course
The following lab assignments were used in GEOG3420 Remote Sensing of The Environment (Winter 2012):
GEOG3420 Laboratory Exercise 1
An introduction to Whitebox and data sources for satellite imagery. Note the procedure for importing geospatial datasets in Whitebox has been considerably simplified since the time this lab was developed.GEOG3420 Laboratory Exercise 2
Processing airborne laser altimetry (LiDAR) data.GEOG3420 Laboratory Exercise 3
Image correction techniques and panchromatic sharpening.GEOG3420 Laboratory Exercise 4
Principal component analysis and unsupervised classification.GEOG3420 Laboratory Exercise 5
Change detection techniques. Note, this lab is quite free-form, i.e. students are introduced to the concepts of change detection in lecture and then allowed to explore change detection methods within the constraints of a prescribed project.
