Technical Workshop: Advanced Helicopter Cockpit Design

Information processing demands on both civilian and military aircrews have increased enormously as rotorcraft have come to be used for adverse weather, day/night, and remote area missions. Applied psychology, engineering, or operational research for future helicopter cockpit design criteria were identified. Three areas were addressed: (1) operational requirements, (2) advanced avionics, and (3) man-system integration

Integrated Applications of Geo-Information in Environmental Monitoring

This book focuses on fundamental and applied research on geo-information technology, notably optical and radar remote sensing and algorithm improvements, and their applications in environmental monitoring. This Special Issue presents ten high-quality research papers covering up-to-date research in land cover change and desertification analyses, geo-disaster risk and damage evaluation, mining area restoration assessments, the improvement and development of algorithms, and coastal environmental monitoring and object targeting. The purpose of this Special Issue is to promote exchanges, communications and share the research outcomes of scientists worldwide and to bridge the gap between scientific research and its applications for advancing and improving society

Image Registration Workshop Proceedings

Automatic image registration has often been considered as a preliminary step for higher-level processing, such as object recognition or data fusion. But with the unprecedented amounts of data which are being and will continue to be generated by newly developed sensors, the very topic of automatic image registration has become and important research topic. This workshop presents a collection of very high quality work which has been grouped in four main areas: (1) theoretical aspects of image registration; (2) applications to satellite imagery; (3) applications to medical imagery; and (4) image registration for computer vision research

Leveraging Overhead Imagery for Localization, Mapping, and Understanding

Ground-level and overhead images provide complementary viewpoints of the world. This thesis proposes methods which leverage dense overhead imagery, in addition to sparsely distributed ground-level imagery, to advance traditional computer vision problems, such as ground-level image localization and fine-grained urban mapping. Our work focuses on three primary research areas: learning a joint feature representation between ground-level and overhead imagery to enable direct comparison for the task of image geolocalization, incorporating unlabeled overhead images by inferring labels from nearby ground-level images to improve image-driven mapping, and fusing ground-level imagery with overhead imagery to enhance understanding. The ultimate contribution of this thesis is a general framework for estimating geospatial functions, such as land cover or land use, which integrates visual evidence from both ground-level and overhead image viewpoints

Assessing the risk of sediment-associated nickel exposure to benthic marine biota in Southeast Asia and Melanesia

The Southeast Asia and Melanesia (SEAM) region has extensive nickel-rich lateritic regoliths formed from the tropical weathering of ultramafic rocks. As the global demand for nickel continues to rise, these lateritic regoliths are increasingly being exploited for their economic benefit. Mining of these lateritic regoliths contributes to the enrichment of coastal sediments in trace metals, especially nickel. A review of tropical estuarine and marine ecotoxicity data for nickel highlighted the absence of sediment ecotoxicity data, benthic test species and the associated sediment toxicity test methods required to assess the potential impacts of sediment nickel exposure to benthic biota of SEAM. The aim of this thesis was to use a multiple lines of evidence approach to provide a robust evidence-base and risk assessment tools applicable for informing environmental risk assessment of nickel-rich estuarine and marine sediments within the SEAM region. A whole sediment bioassay based on sub-lethal effects was adapted for use with the tropical benthic marine diatom Ceratoneis closterium (Chapter 3). Effects data relevant to the SEAM region were then derived for three nickel-spiked sediments and two field-contaminated sediments. No toxicity based on chlorophyll-a concentration was observed in the sediment with the highest total organic carbon content (5%) (72-h 10% effect concentration (EC10) \u3e4,300 mg/kg dilute-acid extractable concentration of nickel). The sediments without significant total organic carbon content (1%) were toxic above 950 mg/kg dilute-acid extractable nickel (72-h EC10). The tropical benthic snail Nassarius dorsatus was also investigated for its suitability for developing a whole-sediment bioassay but was found to be relatively tolerant to dissolved nickel exposure (juvenile 21-d lowest observable effect concentration (LOEC) based on scavenging ability endpoint of 380 g Ni/L). It was concluded that a species relevant to SEAM with greater sensitivity to nickel is required to provide greater confidence that using a whole-sediment bioassay as a line of evidence in sediment quality assessment will identify sediments likely to have adverse effects. This research highlighted the need for a more strategic approach for selecting species to develop new bioassays or alternative tools for investigating contaminated sediments in the absence of sensitive whole-sediment toxicity test methods relevant to the SEAM region

Monitoring wetlands and water bodies in semi-arid Sub-Saharan regions

Surface water in wetlands is a critical resource in semi-arid West-African regions that are frequently exposed to droughts. Wetlands are of utmost importance for the population as well as the environment, and are subject to rapidly changing seasonal fluctuations. Dynamics of wetlands in the study area are still poorly understood, and the potential of remote sensing-derived information as a large-scale, multi-temporal, comparable and independent measurement source is not exploited. This work shows successful wetland monitoring with remote sensing in savannah and Sahel regions in Burkina Faso, focusing on the main study site Lac Bam (Lake Bam). Long-term optical time series from MODIS with medium spatial resolution (MR), and short-term synthetic aperture radar (SAR) time series from TerraSAR-X and RADARSAT-2 with high spatial resolution (HR) successfully demonstrate the classification and dynamic monitoring of relevant wetland features, e.g. open water, flooded vegetation and irrigated cultivation. Methodological highlights are time series analysis, e.g. spatio-temporal dynamics or multitemporal-classification, as well as polarimetric SAR (polSAR) processing, i.e. the Kennaugh elements, enabling physical interpretation of SAR scattering mechanisms for dual-polarized data. A multi-sensor and multi-frequency SAR data combination provides added value, and reveals that dual-co-pol SAR data is most recommended for monitoring wetlands of this type. The interpretation of environmental or man-made processes such as water areas spreading out further but retreating or evaporating faster, co-occurrence of droughts with surface water and vegetation anomalies, expansion of irrigated agriculture or new dam building, can be detected with MR optical and HR SAR time series. To capture long-term impacts of water extraction, sedimentation and climate change on wetlands, remote sensing solutions are available, and would have great potential to contribute to water management in Africa