Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera

Great research from TU Berlin!



link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Th5zlUe6gOE

Tanks turn invisible

here is an interesting military research...

link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDk5cA8JUIQ

International LIDAR Mapping Forum 2011

Great event in New Orleans!

"ILMF 2011 will showcase more than 50 leading companies in this rapidly growing global market. Exhibitors include the LIDAR and complementary sensor manufacturers, survey service companies, data processing, GIS and management specialists and the latest mobile mapping vehicles."

info and source: http://www.lidarmap.org/ILMF.aspx

GIS Applications - Biodiversity Geographic Information System

I want to present a great research about a Biodiversity Geographic Information System. 2010 is the year of biodeversity. I think, this application represents also an importat part of the protectection of bidiversity.

"Goals: To achieve the aim of creating a network of natural resources and ecological data, this project belongs to Natural Resources and Ecology GIS Database of the "10-year Plan for Building and Promoting National Geographic Information System" and promotes to build up the basis of data and databases. The system of data standardization assists the data interoperability and sharing. Also, the internet technologies enable developers to build up a web platform for front-end query, display, and back-end management. Thus, users can browse, query, add, and manage the species data through a browser to achieve the goal of central management, distributed applications, and data sharing and to improve the data use efficiency."

source: http://www.supergeotek.com

Mapping Ancient Civilization - New York Times

"For a quarter of a century, two archaeologists and their team slogged through wild tropical vegetation to investigate and map the remains of one of the largest Maya cities, in Central America. Slow, sweaty hacking with machetes seemed to be the only way to discover the breadth of an ancient urban landscape now hidden beneath a dense forest canopy...."



Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/science/11maya.html

Interesting article in NYTimes!

Underwater 3D shape reconstruction by fringe projection - CAA

Hallo everybody!

Sorry for the long time...

My second fovourite presentatiton was from CAA: "Underwater 3D shape reconstruction by fringe projection"
Great research at the University of Calabria, Italy (Bianco, G., Bruno, F., Muzzupappa, M., Luchi, M.L.).
Our Institute accomplished a big camera calibration project for underwater archaeological documentation, which was an interesting topic.


Part of Introcuction:

"....In this work, we have tested the effectiveness of a
whole-field structured light technique, based on
fringe projection, in underwater environment. The
Fringe Projection Technique (FPT) is widely used in
air (RASTOGI and GORTHI, 2010), and consists of
projection and acquisition of sinusoidal patterns on
the object (in the simplest case, one pattern is
enough). The system is composed by a video
projector and a digital camera, and the geometrical
setup is based on the principle of optical
triangulation. The recorded images are analyzed to
evaluate the phase-map of the object - which contains
the height information - with a signal processing
technique such as Fourier Transform (FT) , Wavelet
Transform (WT) , Windowed Fourier Transform
(WFT) , Spatial Phase Detection (SPD) or Phase
Stepping (PS). Any of these techniques of phase
measurement provides a discontinuous phase map of
the object (wrapped): so it becomes necessary to use
phase unwrapping in order to obtain a continuous
phase distribution (SURREL, 1998). By knowing the
intrinsic (focal distances, coordinates of the principal
points, and distortions) and extrinsic (relative
positions between the optical devises) parameters,
one can calculate the point clouds from the
triangulation between a optical ray of the camera (at
i,j pixel with phase value φi,j) and the relative plane
in the projector frame at the same phase value...."

IP-S2 - High Accuracy Mobile Mapping System

"The IP-S2 provides fast, safe GIS data collection at a cost well below conventional ground mapping methods and it has flexible options for mounting on a vehicle.

Features include:

• High definition mobile 3D mapping
• Dual-frequency GNSS tracking
• High-accuracy 6-axis IMU integration
• Odometry inputs from on-board vehicle CAN bus or wheel encoders
• Supports mutliple laser scanner models for operation and application flexibility"

source: http://www.theppigroup.com/campaign.html?campaign=IPS2

5th International Workshop on 3D Geo Information, 3-4 November 2010, Berlin

"The 5th International 3D GeoInfo Conference 2010 aims at bringing together international state-of-the-art research and facilitating the dialogue on emerging topics in the field of 3D geo-information. In recent years, research has focused on improving 3D data acquisition technology through remote sensing, photogrammetry, laser altimetry techniques (LiDAR), and visualization technology (3D CAD and Virtual Reality (VR) system) for 3D urban environments...."

source and more information: http://www.igg.tu-berlin.de/3dgeoinfo/

call for papers: http://www.igg.tu-berlin.de/3dgeoinfo/cfp.pdf

Mapping Riparian Vegetation with Lidar Data

Combining GIS and lidar data enabled predictive mapping for riparian areas for a portion of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Riparian areas pose many problems for vegetation modeling because of their narrow width, dendritic pattern, and the sensitivity of plant species to subtle changes in topography that cannot be easily recorded by coarse-scale digital elevation models (DEMs). Vegetation mapping and monitoring in riparian areas have relied heavily on field-based surveys that record the distribution of plant communities along transects perpendicular to the river. Typically, these studies also collect ancillary variables, such as stage elevation or height above the river (HAR), soil texture, and soil moisture, that are used to predict the distribution of vegetation types. However, these methods are extremely time consuming and do not allow for the development of predictive maps because the data collected cannot easily be extrapolated to a larger region. GIS and lidar data provide an opportunity to derive variables, such as HAR, for large areas, making wall-to-wall predictive mapping a possibility.“

Interesting paper, authors: By Thomas E. Dilts, Jian Yang, and Peter J. Weisberg, University of Nevada, Reno

ArcGIS Spatial Analyst extension was used, good example to create a model with ArcGIS from LiDAR dataset.

Link: http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/0110/files/mapping-with-lidar.pdf

USS Missouri Point Cloud Animation

"Point cloud animation of the USS Missouri (BB-63). The entire external hull of the ship was documented in January 2010 while in dry-dock by team headed by Smart GeoMetrics..."



link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPtT4LXwMBs&feature=player_embedded

New Home Robot Vacuum Cleaner with Laser Vision RPS Technology

"The Neato XV-11 is the first mapping robot with intelligent path planning and cleaning. Using RPS Technology, the Neato XV-11 has a 360-degree view of a room, allowing it to map the details including walls, furniture, doorways and other obstacles up to four meters away. Unlike other cleaning robots that randomly bounce around a room, the Neato XV-11 maps the room with its RPS Technology. It then methodically cleans floors using SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) technology and path planning algorithms to outline the area to clean and then fully clean within the space in a back-and-forth pattern."




Funny presentation of this laser based vacuum cleaner. Like "War of the Worlds" for the powerless ants... :)
youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXKAjBqTGLo

Path finding algorithms

A nice article about AI pathfinding in modern AAA title computer games:

http://www.ai-blog.net/archives/000152.html

Don't worry, it does not contain any piece of source code.. lot of pictures, no hard math.

The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica

"The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA) is the first true-color, high-spatial-resolution image of the seventh continent. It is constructed from nearly 1100 individually selected Landsat-7 ETM+ scenes. Each image was orthorectified and adjusted for geometric, sensor and illumination variations to a standardized, almost seamless surface reflectance product. Mosaicing to avoid clouds produced a high quality, nearly cloud-free benchmark data set of Antarctica for the International Polar Year from images collected primarily during 1999–2003...."

I like movies, one of my favorite is “The Thing” in the sci-fi/horror category. The story plays on an Antarctic research station. The man can feel on this place the weakness, it is impossible to get help. If I could choose between ice and desert, like extreme places on the earth, I would like to travel to Antarctica. Darkness and nothing (wintertime)…. It is peaceful!

link:

http://lima.usgs.gov/

Airborne and Terrestrial Laser Scanning and geomorphology: possibilities, problems, and solutions

New Congress in Vienna:

European Geosciences Union
General Assembly 2010
Vienna, Austria, 02 – 07 May 2010

On this general assembly: "Airborne and Terrestrial Laser Scanning and Geomorphology" The session number is GM 2.2

"....Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) is also increasingly applied for fast data capture of the surface, e.g., in detection and monitoring of mass movements and in other geomorphic studies requiring high accuracy and frequent repetition.
The application of both laser scanning technique results in data sets characterised by enormous data sizes, extremely high accuracy (up to cm-scale) and very high resolution. These properties compensate for the efforts invested in the data processing, however it means new challenges for the geomorphic evaluation. The wealth of laser scanning-derived DTMs can be used for geomorphic analyses in various forms (point cloud, TIN, grid) for analysis in flood-endangered regions, for natural hazard analyses like mass movements and are almost unbeatable in surface modelling of mountainous and karstic areas. They are also highly applicable in environmental change studies concerning the change in snow and ice coverage, soil creep, etc....."

Link:

http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2010/session/3080

AN INTEGRATED WORKFLOW FOR LIDAR / OPTICAL DATA MAPPING FOR SECURITY APPLICATIONS

SECURITY APPLICATIONS:

"ABSTRACT:

This paper elucidates the potential of LiDAR data for information generation for security applications. The study is embedded in the EU Network of Excellence GMOSS. General, security applications cover a large area from infrastructure monitoring (e.g. power stations, pipelines) or border monitoring to less tangible threats like terrorism and civil security / homeland security. It is demonstrated that for those security applications where the birds eye view can generally provide useful information LiDAR data are increasingly a valuable source of information, either stand alone or – preferable – in combination with optical data. The empirical work focuses on the extraction of some buildings and power lines. It is demonstrated that aggregated grid data in form of a DTM and DSM are only partially suitable to extract linear and point-type features such as power lines or small power transformation stations. Detectability clearly depends on the spatial resolution but generally 3D point clouds from first and last pulse information allow more sophisticated object extraction methods."

Full paper:

http://earth.definiens.com/sites/default/files/319_139_full.pdf

Integration of regional to outcrop digital data: 3D visualisation

A very interesting paper....

"Abstract

Multi-scale geological models contain three-dimensional, spatially referenced data, typically spanning at least six orders of magnitude from outcrop to regional scale. A large number of different geological and geophysical data sources can be combined into a single model. Established 3D visualisation methods that are widely used in hydrocarbon exploration and production for sub-surface data have been adapted for onshore surface geology through a combination of methods for digital data acquisition, 3D visualisation, and geospatial analysis. The integration of georeferenced data across a wider than normal range in scale helps to address several of the existing limitations that are inherent in traditional methods of map production and publishing. The primary advantage of a multi-scale approach is that spatial precision and dimensionality (which are generally degraded when data are displayed in 2D at a single scale) can be preserved at all scales. Real-time, immersive, interactive software, based on a ‘‘3D geospatial’’ graphical user interface (GUI), allows complex geological architectures to be depicted, and is more inherently intuitive than software based on a standard ‘‘desktop’’ GUI metaphor. The continuing convergence of different kinds of geo-modelling, GIS, and visualisation software, as well as industry acceptance of standardised middleware, has helped to make multi-scale geological models a practical reality. Thisis illustrated with two case studies from NE England and NW Scotland."

More on this website:

http://www.dur.ac.uk/r.r.jones/Downloads/C&G2008_Jones_etal_Vis_Multi-scale_Models.pdf

Global Mapper and Basic Visualization of GEON LiDAR Workflow Products

I like Global Mapper, cheap GIS program. You can create orthophotos in this program. The fine visualization of LIDAR datasets is possible, as well. Here is a link, a tutorial, how does it work…..

http://cws.unavco.org:8080/cws/learn/uscs/2008/2008Lidar/handouts/Global_Mapper_and_GLW.pdf

Virtual Archaeologists Recreate Parts of Ancient Worlds

Hallo everybody!

Happy New Year! Sorry for the long time...December was not the best month. :)

My favorite new paper from Michael Bawaya:

"Archaeologists are using computers to recreate the environment and conditions of the past, including objects, buildings, and landscapes with human actors, such as ancient battles. The field is a natural evolution of archaeology in the digital age. And although virtual archaeology arose in the mid-1990s, it is only now going mainstream, as archaeologists realize the benefits of using computers to make the most of their necessarily incomplete data and as costs go down. Archaeologists argue that virtual worlds offer the best way to test complex hypotheses. The field also gets a boost from the entertainment industry: The technology is the same as that used in video games and movie special effects, and many universities have recently added 3D modeling programs......."

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/327/5962/140

Making 3D maps on the move

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23967/?a=f

14. International Congress "Cultural Heritage and New Technologies" - Vienna

TerraFormatics will be there! You will find some fresh news on our blog!

Workshop 14 will be held
from November 16th to November 18th 2009 in Vienna, CITY HALL (Rathaus der Stadt Wien)

MAIN TOPIC 2009:
ARCHIVING - or building an information system

Archiving is today central to nearly all aspects of Cultural Heritage Management.
Archives (Archaeological excavations, libraries, documents, data collections,...) are important data repositories.
The data contained in correctly treated and accessible archives makes wide and varied information available.
How can archiving in all its aspects best promote knowledge about and support the protection and conservation of cultural heritage?

Link:

http://www.stadtarchaeologie.at/