The SIMCA algorithm for processing ground penetrating radar data and its practical applications

The main objective of this thesis is to present a new image processing technique to improve the detectability of buried objects such as landmines using Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR). The main challenge of GPR based landmine detection is to have an accurate image analysis method that is capable of reducing false alarms. However an accurate image relies on having sufficient spatial resolution in the received signal. An Antipersonnel mine (APM) can have a diameter as little as 2cm, whereas many soils have very high attenuation at frequencies above 450 MHz. In order to solve the detection problem, a system level analysis of the issues involved with the recognition of landmines using image reconstruction is required. The thesis illustrates the development of a novel technique called the SIMCA (“SIMulated Correlation Algorithm”) based on area or volume correlation between the trace that would be returned by an ideal point reflector in the soil conditions at the site (obtained using the realistic simulation of Maxwell’s equations) and the actual trace. During an initialization phase, SIMCA carries out radar simulation using the system parameters of the radar and the soil properties. Then SIMCA takes the raw data as the radar is scanned over the ground and uses a clutter removal technique to remove various unwanted signals of clutter such as cross talk, initial ground reflection and antenna ringing. The trace which would be returned by a target under these conditions is then used to form a correlation kernel using a GPR simulator. The 2D GPR scan (B scan), formed by abutting successive time-amplitude plots taken from different spatial positions as column vectors,is then correlated with the kernel using the Pearson correlation coefficient resulting in a correlated image which is brightest at points most similar to the canonical target. This image is then raised to an odd power >2 to enhance the target/background separation. The first part of the thesis presents a 2-dimensional technique using the B scans which have been produced as a result of correlating the clutter removed radargram (’B scan’) with the kernel produced from the simulation. In order to validate the SIMCA 2D algorithm, qualitative evidence was used where comparison was made between the B scans produced by the SIMCA algorithm with B scans from some other techniques which are the best alternative systems reported in the open literature. It was found from this that the SIMCA algorithm clearly produces clearer B scans in comparison to the other techniques. Next quantitative evidence was used to validate the SIMCA algorithm and demonstrate that it produced clear images. Two methods are used to obtain this quantitative evidence. In the first method an expert GPR user and 4 other general users are used to predict the location of landmines from the correlated B scans and validate the SIMCA 2D algorithm. Here human users are asked to indicate the location of targets from a printed sheet of paper which shows the correlated B scans produced by the SIMCA algorithm after some training, bearing in mind that it is a blind test. For the second quantitative evidence method, the AMIRA software is used to obtain values of the burial depth and position of the target in the x direction and hence validate the SIMCA 2D algorithm. Then the absolute error values for the burial depth along with the absolute error values for the position in the x direction obtained from the SIMCA algorithm and the Scheers et al’s algorithm when compared to the corresponding ground truth values were calculated. Two-dimensional techniques that use B scans do not give accurate information on the shape and dimensions of the buried target, in comparison to 3D techniques that use 3D data (’C scans’). As a result the next part of the thesis presents a 3-dimensional technique. The equivalent 3D kernel is formed by rotating the 2D kernel produced by the simulation along the polar co-ordinates, whilst the 3D data is the clutter removed C scan. Then volume correlation is performed between the intersecting parts of the kernel and the data. This data is used to create iso-surfaces of the slices raised to an odd power > 2. To validate the algorithm an objective validation process which compares the actual target volume to that produced by the re-construction process is used. The SIMCA 3D technique and the Scheers et al’s (the best alternative system reported in the open literature) technique are used to image a variety of landmines using GPR scans. The types of mines included plastic, wooden and glass ones. In all cases clear images were obtained with SIMCA. In contrast Scheers’ algorithm, the present state-of-the-art, failed to provide clear images of non metallic landmines. For this thesis, the above algorithms have been tested for landmine data and for locating foundations in demolished buildings and to validate and demonstrate that the SIMCA algorithms are better than existing technologies such as the Scheers et al’s method and the REFLEXW commercial software

Radar satellite imagery for humanitarian response. Bridging the gap between technology and application

This work deals with radar satellite imagery and its potential to assist of humanitarian operations. As the number of displaced people annually increases, both hosting countries and relief organizations face new challenges which are often related to unclear situations and lack of information on the number and location of people in need, as well as their environments. It was demonstrated in numerous studies that methods of earth observation can deliver this important information for the management of crises, the organization of refugee camps, and the mapping of environmental resources and natural hazards. However, most of these studies make use of -high-resolution optical imagery, while the role of radar satellites is widely neglected. At the same time, radar sensors have characteristics which make them highly suitable for humanitarian response, their potential to capture images through cloud cover and at night in the first place. Consequently, they potentially allow quicker response in cases of emergencies than optical imagery. This work demonstrates the currently unused potential of radar imagery for the assistance of humanitarian operations by case studies which cover the information needs of specific emergency situations. They are thematically grouped into topics related to population, natural hazards and the environment. Furthermore, the case studies address different levels of scientific objectives: The main intention is the development of innovative techniques of digital image processing and geospatial analysis as an answer on the identified existing research gaps. For this reason, novel approaches are presented on the mapping of refugee camps and urban areas, the allocation of biomass and environmental impact assessment. Secondly, existing methods developed for radar imagery are applied, refined, or adapted to specifically demonstrate their benefit in a humanitarian context. This is done for the monitoring of camp growth, the assessment of damages in cities affected by civil war, and the derivation of areas vulnerable to flooding or sea-surface changes. Lastly, to foster the integration of radar images into existing operational workflows of humanitarian data analysis, technically simple and easily-adaptable approaches are suggested for the mapping of rural areas for vaccination campaigns, the identification of changes within and around refugee camps, and the assessment of suitable locations for groundwater drillings. While the studies provide different levels of technical complexity and novelty, they all show that radar imagery can largely contribute to the provision of a variety of information which is required to make solid decisions and to effectively provide help in humanitarian operations. This work furthermore demonstrates that radar images are more than just an alternative image source for areas heavily affected by cloud cover. In fact, what makes them valuable is their information content regarding the characteristics of surfaces, such as shape, orientation, roughness, size, height, moisture, or conductivity. All these give decisive insights about man-made and natural environments in emergency situations and cannot be provided by optical images Finally, the findings of the case studies are put into a larger context, discussing the observed potential and limitations of the presented approaches. The major challenges are summarized which need be addressed to make radar imagery more useful in humanitarian operations in the context of upcoming technical developments. New radar satellites and technological progress in the fields of machine learning and cloud computing will bring new opportunities. At the same time, this work demonstrated the large need for further research, as well as for the collaboration and transfer of knowledge and experiences between scientists, users and relief workers in the field. It is the first extensive scientific compilation of this topic and the first step for a sustainable integration of radar imagery into operational frameworks to assist humanitarian work and to contribute to a more efficient provision of help to those in need.Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit bildgebenden Radarsatelliten und ihrem potenziellen Beitrag zur Unterstützung humanitärer Einsätze. Die jährlich zunehmende Zahl an vertriebenen oder geflüchteten Menschen stellt sowohl Aufnahmeländer als auch humanitäre Organisationen vor große Herausforderungen, da sie oft mit unübersichtlichen Verhältnissen konfrontiert sind. Effektives Krisenmanagement, die Planung und Versorgung von Flüchtlingslagern, sowie der Schutz der betroffenen Menschen erfordern jedoch verlässliche Angaben über Anzahl und Aufenthaltsort der Geflüchteten und ihrer natürlichen Umwelt. Die Bereitstellung dieser Informationen durch Satellitenbilder wurde bereits in zahlreichen Studien aufgezeigt. Sie beruhen in der Regel auf hochaufgelösten optischen Aufnahmen, während bildgebende Radarsatelliten bisher kaum Anwendung finden. Dabei verfügen gerade Radarsatelliten über Eigenschaften, die hilfreich für humanitäre Einsätze sein können, allen voran ihre Unabhängigkeit von Bewölkung oder Tageslicht. Dadurch ermöglichen sie in Krisenfällen verglichen mit optischen Satelliten eine schnellere Reaktion. Diese Arbeit zeigt das derzeit noch ungenutzte Potenzial von Radardaten zur Unterstützung humanitärer Arbeit anhand von Fallstudien auf, in denen konkrete Informationen für ausgewählte Krisensituationen bereitgestellt werden. Sie sind in die Themenbereiche Bevölkerung, Naturgefahren und Ressourcen aufgeteilt, adressieren jedoch unterschiedliche wissenschaftliche Ansprüche: Der Hauptfokus der Arbeit liegt auf der Entwicklung von innovativen Methoden zur Verarbeitung von Radarbildern und räumlichen Daten als Antwort auf den identifizierten Forschungsbedarf in diesem Gebiet. Dies wird anhand der Kartierung von Flüchtlingslagern zur Abschätzung ihrer Bevölkerung, zur Bestimmung von Biomasse, sowie zur Ermittlung des Umwelteinflusses von Flüchtlingslagern aufgezeigt. Darüber hinaus werden existierende oder erprobte Ansätze für die Anwendung im humanitären Kontext angepasst oder weiterentwickelt. Dies erfolgt im Rahmen von Fallstudien zur Dynamik von Flüchtlingslagern, zur Ermittlung von Schäden an Gebäuden in Kriegsgebieten, sowie zur Erkennung von Risiken durch Überflutung. Zuletzt soll die Integration von Radardaten in bereits existierende Abläufe oder Arbeitsroutinen in der humanitären Hilfe anhand technisch vergleichsweise einfacher Ansätze vorgestellt und angeregt werden. Als Beispiele dienen hier die radargestützte Kartierung von entlegenen Gebieten zur Unterstützung von Impfkampagnen, die Identifizierung von Veränderungen in Flüchtlingslagern, sowie die Auswahl geeigneter Standorte zur Grundwasserentnahme. Obwohl sich die Fallstudien hinsichtlich ihres Innovations- und Komplexitätsgrads unterscheiden, zeigen sie alle den Mehrwert von Radardaten für die Bereitstellung von Informationen, um schnelle und fundierte Planungsentscheidungen zu unterstützen. Darüber hinaus wird in dieser Arbeit deutlich, dass Radardaten für humanitäre Zwecke mehr als nur eine Alternative in stark bewölkten Gebieten sind. Durch ihren Informationsgehalt zur Beschaffenheit von Oberflächen, beispielsweise hinsichtlich ihrer Rauigkeit, Feuchte, Form, Größe oder Höhe, sind sie optischen Daten überlegen und daher für viele Anwendungsbereiche im Kontext humanitärer Arbeit besonders. Die in den Fallstudien gewonnenen Erkenntnisse werden abschließend vor dem Hintergrund von Vor- und Nachteilen von Radardaten, sowie hinsichtlich zukünftiger Entwicklungen und Herausforderungen diskutiert. So versprechen neue Radarsatelliten und technologische Fortschritte im Bereich der Datenverarbeitung großes Potenzial. Gleichzeitig unterstreicht die Arbeit einen großen Bedarf an weiterer Forschung, sowie an Austausch und Zusammenarbeit zwischen Wissenschaftlern, Anwendern und Einsatzkräften vor Ort. Die vorliegende Arbeit ist die erste umfassende Darstellung und wissenschaftliche Aufarbeitung dieses Themenkomplexes. Sie soll als Grundstein für eine langfristige Integration von Radardaten in operationelle Abläufe dienen, um humanitäre Arbeit zu unterstützen und eine wirksame Hilfe für Menschen in Not ermöglichen

Public Health Ethics: Cases Spanning the Globe

Public health ethics can be seen both as the application of principles and norms to guide the practice of public health and as a process for identifying, analyzing, and resolving ethical issues inherent in the practice of public health. Public health ethics helps us decide what we should do and why. Although the practice of public health has always considered ethical issues, the emergence of public health ethics as a discipline is relatively new. Although rooted in bioethics and clinical and research ethics, public health ethics has many characteristics that set it apart. The defining characteristics are its focus on achieving social goods for populations while respecting individual rights and recognizing the interdependence of people. Currently there are few practical training resources for public health practitioners that consider ethical issues and dilemmas likely to arise in the practice of public health. In public health ethics training, we have found it advantageous to use cases to illustrate how ethical principles can be applied in practical ways to decision making. The use of cases encourages reflection and discussion of ethics, reinforces basic ethical concepts through application to concrete examples, highlights practical decision making, allows learners to consider different perspectives, and sensitizes learners to the complex, multidimensional context of issues in public health practice. The case-based approach (known as casuistry) contrasts with the theoretical approach to considering moral principles, rules, and theories. By describing scenarios, cases allow the learner to use ethical principles in the context of a realistic situation that sheds light on ethical challenges and illustrates how ethical principles can help in making practical decisions. This casebook comprises a broad range of cases from around the globe to highlight the ethical challenges of public health. For those new to public health ethics, Section I introduces public health ethics. Chapter 1, “Public Health Ethics: Global Cases, Practice, and Context” by Ortmann and colleagues, summarizes basic concepts and describes how public health ethics differ from bioethics, clinical ethics, and research ethics. The chapter also includes an approach for conducting an ethical analysis in public health. In Chap. 2, “Essential Cases in the Development of Public Health Ethics,” Lee, Spector-Bagdady, and Sakhuja highlight important events that shaped the practice of public health and explain how practitioners address and prevent ethical challenges. Section II is organized into chapters that discuss the following public health topics: • Resource allocation and priority setting • Disease prevention and control • Chronic disease prevention and health promotion • Environmental and occupational public health • Vulnerability and marginalized populations • International collaboration for global public health • Public health research We have invited some of the leading writers and thinkers in public health ethics to provide an overview of the major ethical considerations associated with each topic. The topic overviews offer the authors’ perspectives about applicable ethical theories, frameworks, and tools and draw attention to the cases that follow. The cases are meant to highlight the ethical issues in practice. Each represents the work of authors from around the globe who responded to a solicitation from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We worked with the authors to ensure that each case included a concise articulation of a public health situation that raises ethical tensions, challenges, or concerns that require decisions or recommendations from public health officials or practitioners. The cases are presented in a standard format that includes a background, case description, discussion questions, and references. However, we also allowed for variation in the amount of detail provided in each section and the approach used to set up the case. Our goal was to include just enough contextual information to orient the reader who is not an expert in the case topic. We include the case setting, population, or intervention in question, legal or regulatory landscape, and questions to stimulate discussion on core ethical issues. Each case—although fictionalized—is as realistic as possible to reflect the ethical challenges that public health practitioners face daily. Sometimes the cases were based on actual or composite events. In these instances, the case details were modified to exclude identifying information that could be considered private, sensitive, or disputable by others involved in the case. We deliberately did not attempt to provide a resolution or solution for the cases. Often in public health practice, there is no single correct answer. Instead, ethical analysis in public health is a process to identify the ethical dimensions of the options available and to arrive at a decision that is ethically justifiable, through deliberation and consideration of relevant facts, values, and contexts. The cases and other writings in this book represent the opinions, findings, and conclusions of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position, views, or policies of the editors, the editors’ host institutions, or the authors’ host institutions. We decided which topic category to place the case in to best distribute the cases across chapters. However, you may note that some cases cross topic areas and could just as easily have been included in another chapter. This casebook is written for public health practitioners, including frontline workers, field epidemiology trainers and trainees, and managers, planners, and decision makers with an interest in learning about how to integrate ethical analysis in their day-to-day public health practice. However, the casebook will also be useful to instructors in schools of public health and public health students as well as to academic ethicists who can use the book to teach public health ethics and distinguish it from clinical and research ethics. Our hope is that the casebook will increase awareness and understanding of public health ethics and the value of ethical analysis in public health practice in all of its forms. This includes applied public health research; public health policy development, implementation, and evaluation; and public health decision making in national and international field settings and training programs. By emphasizing prospective practical decision making, rather than just presenting a theoretical academic discussion of ethical principles, we hope this casebook will serve as a useful tool to support instruction, debate, and dialogue about the nature of ethical challenges encountered in public health practice and how to resolve these challenges. We recommend discussing the cases in small groups and using the discussion questions, the ethical framework described in Chap. 1, and the information provided in the topic area overview sections as a starting place for exploring the ethical issues reflected in the cases. The ultimate goal of case-based learning is to develop skills in ethical analysis and decision making in daily public health practice. The ethical framework provides a convenient tool for putting our ideas into practice

Cyber Ethics 4.0 : Serving Humanity with Values

Cyber space influences all sectors of life and society: Artificial Intelligence, Robots, Blockchain, Self-Driving Cars and Autonomous Weapons, Cyberbullying, telemedicine and cyber health, new methods in food production, destruction and conservation of the environment, Big Data as a new religion, the role of education and citizens’ rights, the need for legal regulations and international conventions. The 25 articles in this book cover the wide range of hot topics. Authors from many countries and positions of international (UN) organisations look for solutions from an ethical perspective. Cyber Ethics aims to provide orientation on what is right and wrong, good and bad, related to the cyber space. The authors apply and modify fundamental values and virtues to specific, new challenges arising from cyber technology and cyber society. The book serves as reading material for teachers, students, policy makers, politicians, businesses, hospitals, NGOs and religious organisations alike. It is an invitation for dialogue, debate and solution

Faculty Publications and Creative Works 1997

One of the ways we recognize our faculty at the University of New Mexico is through this annual publication which highlights our faculty\u27s scholarly and creative activities and achievements and serves as a compendium of UNM faculty efforts during the 1997 calendar year. Faculty Publications and Creative Works strives to illustrate the depth and breadth of research activities performed throughout our University\u27s laboratories, studios and classrooms. We believe that the communication of individual research is a significant method of sharing concepts and thoughts and ultimately inspiring the birth of new of ideas. In support of this, UNM faculty during 1997 produced over 2,770 works, including 2,398 scholarly papers and articles, 72 books, 63 book chapters, 82 reviews, 151 creative works and 4 patents. We are proud of the accomplishments of our faculty which are in part reflected in this book, which illustrates the diversity of intellectual pursuits in support of research and education at the University of New Mexico. Nasir Ahmed Interim Associate Provost for Research and Dean of Graduate Studie