Abstract

Light Detection and Ranging, as an active Remote Sensing Technology, enables gathering accurate, three-dimensional point cloud of scanned objects. Laser scanning might be provided on the terrestrial level for specific, defined constructions, as well as on the airborne level for aerial or linear objects. Using a laser sensor mounted on a moving platform is currently the most efficient way of obtaining in a short period, accurate positions of billions of points as a representation of a scanned area. Based on this kind of dataset it is possible to perform three-dimensional analysis of the safety of scanned objects without additional measurements in the field. This article presents the analysis performed in vMatic software on data from Airborne Laser Scanning for medium voltage power line verification of obstacles with the buildings. The analysis took less than 20 seconds for the detection of buildings points that are closer than 5m from conductors for seven spans wit a total length of almost 400m. Providing distance verification on 3D point cloud data is the fastest way to obtain a hazard awareness in a short time. Once acquired by LiDAR data can be used for other various analyses for any construction, depending on current, expected and future needs.

Abstract

Zhang et al. (2019). Towards Scalable Geospatial Remote Sensing for Efficient OSM Labeling In: Minghini, M., Grinberger, A.Y., Juhász, L., Yeboah, G., Mooney, P. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2019, 27-28. Heidelberg, Germany, September 21-23, 2019. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2019 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3387715

Abstract

In Mexico, when municipal solid waste final disposal sites are closed or complete their life cycle, municipal authorities abandon them without carrying out remediation processes. In the Sotavento Region, state of Veracruz, Mexico, through geographic information systems, interviews with municipalities and field visits, 9 abandoned dumpsites were located: two sanitary landfills, two controlled final disposal sites called controlled dumps, and five uncontrolled final disposal sites known as open-air dumps. The results using Google Earth made it possible to determine that these dumps, as a whole, occupied an area of 366,852 m2, with an accumulated volume of waste of 2,015,500m3 and an estimated quantity of 2,498,571 tons of confined waste without control. Such results represent a series of environmental impacts that are commonly not detected and whose knowledge can be the starting point for its closure in accordance with the applicable Mexican regulations.

Abstract

In situ, airborne and satellite measurements are used to characterize the structure of water vapor in the lower tropical troposphere—below the height, (Formula presented.) of the triple-point isotherm, (Formula presented.) The measurements are evaluated in light of understanding of how lower-tropospheric water vapor influences clouds, convection and circulation, through both radiative and thermodynamic effects. Lower-tropospheric water vapor, which concentrates in the first few kilometers above the boundary layer, controls the radiative cooling profile of the boundary layer and lower troposphere. Elevated moist layers originating from a preferred level of convective detrainment induce a profile of radiative cooling that drives circulations which reinforce such features. A theory for this preferred level of cumulus termination is advanced, whereby the difference between (Formula presented.) and the temperature at which primary ice forms gives a ‘first-mover advantage’ to glaciating cumulus convection, thereby concentrating the regions of the deepest convection and leading to more clouds and moisture near the triple point. A preferred level of convective detrainment near (Formula presented.) implies relative humidity reversals below (Formula presented.) which are difficult to identify using retrievals from satellite-borne microwave and infrared sounders. Isotopologues retrievals provide a hint of such features and their ability to constrain the structure of the vertical humidity profile merits further study. Nonetheless, it will likely remain challenging to resolve dynamically important aspects of the vertical structure of water vapor from space using only passive sensors. © 2017 The Author(s) Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Abstract

The Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO/HMI) provides continuous full-disk observations of solar oscillations. We develop a data-analysis pipeline based on the time-distance helioseismology method to measure acoustic travel times using HMI Doppler-shift observations, and infer solar interior properties by inverting these measurements. The pipeline is used for routine production of near-real-time full-disk maps of subsurface wave-speed perturbations and horizontal flow velocities for depths ranging from 0 to 20 Mm, every eight hours. In addition, Carrington synoptic maps for the subsurface properties are made from these full-disk maps. The pipeline can also be used for selected target areas and time periods. We explain details of the pipeline organization and procedures, including processing of the HMI Doppler observations, measurements of the travel times, inversions, and constructions of the full-disk and synoptic maps. Some initial results from the pipeline, including full-disk flow maps, sunspot subsurface flow fields, and the interior rotation and meridional flow speeds, are presented. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Abstract

The thermal infrared imager TIR onboard Hayabusa2 has been developed to investigate thermo-physical properties of C-type, near-Earth asteroid 162173 Ryugu. TIR is one of the remote science instruments on Hayabusa2 designed to understand the nature of a volatile-rich solar system small body, but it also has significant mission objectives to provide information on surface physical properties and conditions for sampling site selection as well as the assessment of safe landing operations. TIR is based on a two-dimensional uncooled micro-bolometer array inherited from the Longwave Infrared Camera LIR on Akatsuki (Fukuhara et al., 2011). TIR takes images of thermal infrared emission in 8 to 12 ?m with a field of view of \\(16 \\times 12^{\\circ}\\) and a spatial resolution of \\(0.05^{\\circ}\\) per pixel. TIR covers the temperature range from 150 to 460 K, including the well calibrated range from 230 to 420 K. Temperature accuracy is within 2 K or better for summed images, and the relative accuracy or noise equivalent temperature difference (NETD) at each of pixels is 0.4 K or lower for the well-calibrated temperature range. TIR takes a couple of images with shutter open and closed, the corresponding dark frame, and provides a true thermal image by dark frame subtraction. Data processing involves summation of multiple images, image processing including the StarPixel compression (Hihara et al., 2014), and transfer to the data recorder in the spacecraft digital electronics (DE). We report the scientific and mission objectives of TIR, the requirements and constraints for the instrument specifications, the designed instrumentation and the pre-flight and in-flight performances of TIR, as well as its observation plan during the Hayabusa2 mission. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Abstract

Automatic multi-class object detection in remote sensing images in unconstrained scenarios is of high interest for several applications including traffic monitoring and disaster management. The huge variation in object scale, orientation, category, and complex backgrounds, as well as the different camera sensors pose great challenges for current algorithms. In this work, we propose a new method consisting of a novel joint image cascade and feature pyramid network with multi-size convolution kernels to extract multi-scale strong and weak semantic features. These features are fed into rotation-based region proposal and region of interest networks to produce object detections. Finally, rotational non-maximum suppression is applied to remove redundant detections. During training, we minimize joint horizontal and oriented bounding box loss functions, as well as a novel loss that enforces oriented boxes to be rectangular. Our method achieves 68.16% mAP on horizontal and 72.45% mAP on oriented bounding box detection tasks on the challenging DOTA dataset, outperforming all published methods by a large margin (+6% and +12% absolute improvement, respectively). Furthermore, it generalizes to two other datasets, NWPU VHR-10 and UCAS-AOD, and achieves competitive results with the baselines even when trained on DOTA. Our method can be deployed in multi-class object detection applications, regardless of the image and object scales and orientations, making it a great choice for unconstrained aerial and satellite imagery. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Abstract

Ophir Corporation was awarded a contract by the U. S. Department of Energy, National Energy Technology Laboratory under the Project Title ''Airborne, Optical Remote Sensing of Methane and Ethane for Natural Gas Pipeline Leak Detection'' on October 14, 2002. This six-month technical report summarizes the progress for each of the proposed tasks, discusses project concerns, and outlines near-term goals. Ophir has completed a data survey of two major natural gas pipeline companies on the design requirements for an airborne, optical remote sensor. The results of this survey are disclosed in this report. A substantial amount of time was spent on modeling the expected optical signal at the receiver at different absorption wavelengths, and determining the impact of noise sources such as solar background, signal shot noise, and electronic noise on methane and ethane gas detection. Based upon the signal to noise modeling and industry input, Ophir finalized the design requirements for the airborne sensor, and released the critical sensor light source design requirements to qualified vendors. Responses from the vendors indicated that the light source was not commercially available, and will require a research and development effort to produce. Three vendors have responded positively with proposed design solutions. Ophir has decided to conduct short path optical laboratory experiments to verify the existence of methane and absorption at the specified wavelength, prior to proceeding with the light source selection. Techniques to eliminate common mode noise were also evaluated during the laboratory tests. Finally, Ophir has included a summary of the potential concerns for project success and has established future goals. Document type: Report

Abstract

Ophir Corporation was awarded a contract by the U. S. Department of Energy, National Energy Technology Laboratory under the Project Title ''Airborne, Optical Remote Sensing of Methane and Ethane for Natural Gas Pipeline Leak Detection'' on October 14, 2002. The scope of the work involved designing and developing an airborne, optical remote sensor capable of sensing methane and, if possible, ethane for the detection of natural gas pipeline leaks. Flight testing using a custom dual wavelength, high power fiber amplifier was initiated in February 2005. Ophir successfully demonstrated the airborne system, showing that it was capable of discerning small amounts of methane from a simulated pipeline leak. Leak rates as low as 150 standard cubic feet per hour (scf/h) were detected by the airborne sensor. Document type: Report