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12-03-2008

CCRS/ASPRS 2007 Specialty Conference

Our Common Borders

 

Our Common Borders – Safety, Security, and the Environment through Remote Sensing, was the title of this year’s specialty conference co-presented by the CCRS (Canadian Centre for Remote Sensing) and the ASPRS (American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing). The CCRS is a branch of Natural Resources Canada Earth Sciences Sector and is the government’s centre of expertise for space-based remote sensing science and technology. It has been supporting the use of Earth observation data and information for more than 30 years.

 

By Frank Artés


Data collected with Optech's new LYNX Mobile Mapper using a single sensor head. 
(Image courtesy: Optech Incorporated) .

 

Held in Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, this year’s event was the fourth in a series which follows the popular joint-organization format, designed to encourage strong and positive interaction. This year’s conference put the emphasis on remote sensing across the world’s longest common border, that between Canada and the United States. Olaf Niemann, Canadian Conference Co-Chair, stated “As geospatial professionals, we are often challenged by the constraints that borders impose on our work. The answers to the questions that we are asked must often transcend these borders, and that is what this conference proposes to do.”  It was an exciting five days which encompassed workshops, technical sessions, panel discussions and presentations aimed at stimulating dialogue, debate and discourse.

 

Keynote Opening Session

The keynote address was given by two individuals well positioned to offer insight and reasoned perspective on the influence today’s geospatial technology has on North America, particularly with regard to cross-border cooperation on issues such as environmental awareness and decision-making based on good science. Mark Corey, Assistant Deputy Minister, Earth Sciences Sector, Natural Resources Canada, and Timothy Petty, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, U.S Department of the Interior presented a very interesting overview on the state of affairs between the two nations. 

The Canada – US border is the longest international boundary between two countries. It extends 8,893 kilometers over land and water, including the Great Lakes and maritime boundaries on the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic coasts. The border is often referred to as the 49th parallel but that degree of latitude only encompasses the plane from Vancouver to Lake of the Woods in Ontario. Canada’s most southerly point extends close to the 42nd parallel and its northern extremes reach the Beaufort Sea at the Alaska – Yukon frontier.

It is estimated that in excess of 300,000 North Americans and well over a billion dollars in goods and services cross the border each day*. So yes, border cooperation is extremely important between the two countries, reinforcing the old adage “good fences make good neighbors.” 

Focusing on the importance of information exchange, both Corey and Petty emphasized the unique advantages of maintaining close ties with your neighbor, particularly in the areas of remote sensing allowing the fusion of imaging and information technologies to open up a wealth of new and exciting opportunities. What was once considered to be a high-end technology has now become a mainstream component in today’s geospatial arsenal. The availability of satellite imagery for instance, particularly long-term datasets, has enabled unprecedented cross-communication between government and private industry. Since 2002, satellite images have revealed the extent to which early spring-time melting has contributed to the decrease in sea ice around Alaska, Canada and northern Siberia. According to a national collaboration of scientists and researchers, Arctic sea ice has been retreating at a rate of over 8 percent per decade.



City of Pittsburgh model developed under contract with DHS for infrastructure protection. 
(Image courtesy: Overwatch).

Workshops

An important part of any technology-based conference is the availability of workshops to offer a hands-on opportunity to those attendees interested in systems, software and applications. There is no substitute for obtaining instruction from some of the top experts in the industry and there was ample opportunity to do just that. There were classes on ‘Practical Radar Polarimetry’, presented by MDA Corporation and the Canadian Space Agency, ‘Integrating Imagery for Decision Making’,’ Crafting Geospatial Data Policy to Satisfy Multiple Objectives’, put on by Sanborn and the University of New Hampshire, and ‘Lidar for Mapping and Forest Studies’, presented by the University of California, to highlight just a few. Workshops.

 

Technical Sessions

In addition to the workshops there were a number of excellent technical sessions with a wide range of topics. The subject matter was extremely interesting, such as ‘Assessing Population Movement during the Israel-Lebanon Crisis of 2006 using DMSP Imagery’ and ‘Monitoring Environmental Compliance using Earth Observation Data’, a presentation by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

There were also panel discussions on ‘Rapid Response Imaging, ‘The Effects of North American Policies on Commercial Remote Sensing’, and ‘Airborne Lidar Mapping Technology’. It is impossible to attend all the sessions so it is a matter of prudent selection when deciding what to see and hear. I am particularly interested in Lidar technology and was pleased to see some of the heavyweights in the industry, such as Optech, TopoSys and Leica Geosystems joining forces in presenting a very informative program on the latest technology and the advances in production workflow methodologies. Roman Kathofer, TopoSys North America, made a good case for fiber-based Lidar technology. TopoSys GmbH, the parent company, is currently the only organization manufacturing this type of Lidar system and is a leader in research and development for airborne survey and remote sensing applications.

Exciting developments are also happening at Optech with the release of the company’s latest system, the LYNX Mobile Mapper, which uses four Lidar sensor heads and fuses the data with on-board passive imaging technology. The new system is designed to mount on a vehicle and capture survey-grade Lidar data at over 100,000 measurements per second with a 360 degree field-of-view. Using an Applanix POS LV 420 Inertial/GPS system, the LYNX can generate extremely accurate data under the most challenging urban conditions, such as those encountered in a downtown high-rise environment.

Some of the major sessions focused on more broad-based geo-technical issues. GEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of Systems) for example, formed the basis for numerous off-shoot sessions covering national and international efforts to develop and maintain such a system. Helen Wood, U.S. Group on Earth Observations Co-Chair and GEOSS Integration Manager and Senior Advisor, gave an excellent presentation on the need for improved Earth observation and how it is quickly becoming an international priority. Technology and data fusion is key, and the sharing of data from satellites, weather stations, surface and airborne Earth observation systems can make a significant contribution by providing early warnings to reduce the impact of natural disasters.    

Canada’s Radarsat-2 satellite program was another hot topic which drew a lot of attention, given the fact that its launch date is rapidly approaching and scheduled for sometime between the 8th and the 15th of December.

Bill Jefferies, Director and Chief Technical Officer, Research and Development, MDA Geospatial Services, the prime development partner on the program, explained some of the satellite’s advanced features. As Canada’s next-generation commercial SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite, it is a follow-on development to the existing Radarsat-1 technology but with a radically different fully-phased array antenna and associated imaging sensor electronics. It will orbit 180 degrees out-of-phase with Radarsat-1 with a time offset of approximately 50 minutes.

Radarsat-2 will operate in C-band with an extensive range of attributes designed to generate high resolution, multi-polarization (HH, HV, VH, VV) images. The antenna is fully computer-controlled and can be accurately positioned across the full swath range with a beam-switching time between operating modes of 1 to 2 seconds. The system’s high spatial resolution of 3 to 100 meters allows a wide range of applications, and combined with its ultra-fine beam offers a much improved object detection and feature classification potential.

The satellite’s highly-responsive tasking ability means it can capture images at the earliest opportunity, which is extremely important for disaster management, security and defense applications. The image data will be available within hours after down-load in Canada.  Radarsat-2 will be launched from a Russian Soyuz space vehicle at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

 

Exhibitor Focus

There were close to 35 exhibitors at this year’s conference representing a good cross-section of the North American geomatics community. Government agencies from both Canada and the US were prominent with representatives from Natural Resources Canada, the USGS (United States Geological Survey), FGDC (Federal Geographic Data Committee) and NGA (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency). Geospatial service providers and software developers were definitely in the majority, such as BAE Systems and ESRI Canada, with many putting the spotlight on their latest automated production tools.  

Overwatch Systems, a US-based software company, is one of the leaders in multi-source intelligence development. Its “strategy is to acquire leading companies in the geospatial intelligence marketplace and integrate their world-class technology” to produce a single geospatial framework, which they see as the future of intelligence analysis.

 

In 2006, Overwatch acquired Visual Learning Systems, Paragon Imaging, and All-Source Imaging Systems, in a move towards effectively addressing the multi-source intelligence challenge. St. Louis Site Manager, Brenda Cox, gave me an impressive software demonstration using their Urban Analyst™ suite, which is designed to seamlessly integrate with two of Visual Learning Systems’ most popular tools, Feature Analyst® and Lidar Analyst.

Urban Analyst™ is a dynamic visual interface that allows the user to scrutinize and evaluate their data with a series of complex line-of-sight, measurement, and spatial query tools. Ms. Cox generated a simulated, but all too real, terrorist threat in a downtown urban core. “This system enables you to assess the situation right away, from both a ground level approach and an aerial perspective,” said Ms. Cox. “It gives emergency responders a lot of detailed visual information and helps them to make an informed decision very quickly, by identifying the source location, assessing the potential impact on the immediate area and then generating various response scenarios.” Overwatch has a lot of experience delivering this type of geospatially-accurate 3D urban environment analysis capability to the US Department of Defense and the intelligence community.

 

PCI Geomatics’ AIMM (Automatic Ingest Mosaic Mapping) system was unveiled just a few weeks ago with the company announcing that it had successfully demonstrated the power of its automation technology in a coalition military environment. Designed to perform ortho-correction of both optical and SAR satellite imagery, AIMM can provide wide-area terrain intelligence for battlefield operations using a web interface to load raw  images into an Oracle 10g database.


Photogrammetric data of the damaged area on the Space Shuttle Discovery.
(Image courtesy: Cardinal Systems)

 

Also attracting a lot of attention with its software demos was Cardinal Systems, LLC. Their Vr Mapping photogrammetry products are among the top-rated in the mapping industry where efficient and effective data capture, edit and processing are key. Mike Kitaif, Software Development Manager, put together a striking demonstration of the power of photogrammetry in providing three-dimensional visual information. He used the company’s experience with NASA, one of its prime customers, and the problems the STS-114 Shuttle mission faced prior to returning to Earth. During the launch phase pieces of thermal insulating material were torn off the Space Shuttle Discovery and its external fuel tank during a separation maneuver carried out shortly after takeoff. Using screen-capture visuals and some remarkable space-walk imagery, Mr. Kitaif explained how the company’s software and photogrammetric expertise was used to produce the damage analysis reports to determine whether Discovery would be able to make a safe return to Earth or require external repairs. As a direct result of Cardinal Systems’ input, NASA has since implemented photogrammetric image capture as standard procedure during the launch phase on all subsequent Shuttle missions. 

 

Wrap-up

The ASPRS specialty conferences are a popular event, and an indicator of a strong and vibrant industry. They offer an opportunity to meet, listen and learn from those with a common interest in today’s geo-technology and geo-solutions. Although not as large an event as the annual spring ASPRS conference, there was still in excess of 600 attendees eager to network and focus on the issues affecting today’s geospatial community.  

 

*Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada

 

Frank Artés (http://fartes@geoinformatics.com) is a contributing editor of GeoInformatics. Surf to www.asprs.org. Special thanks to: Sumona Datta, Optech Incorporated;  Wendy Keyzer, Communications Manager, MDA; Jason Price, Cardinal Systems, LLC.