Feasibility study of a new harbour on the island of St. Eustatius

Civil Engineering | Hydraulic Engineerin

A 100 M GROUND RESOLUTION GLOBAL DAILY COVERAGE EARTH OBSERVATION MISSION

PROBA-V has been successfully launched on 7th May 2013 and is providing a global monitoring in the continuity of the SPOT-VEGETATION mission. The progress in terms of ground resolution between Spot VGT and PROBA-V is a factor 3 (1 km to 1/3 km ground resolution product). The User Community requirements for the next generation of global monitoring are a 100 m ground resolution product. This means an additional factor 3 improvement, but in a short time frame (5 years). After success of the PROBA-V mission, the Belgian Science Policy (BELSPO) initiates a PROBA-V Successor feasibility study. This study was undertaken by VITO and CSL to identify potential tracks to achieve a follow-on mission which is expected to be relevant for the User Community. The mission analyses for each of these tracks was evaluated. Today the PROBA-V mission lifetime is expected to expire by mid of 2018. Since the interest for global land monitoring is expected to continue in the future, this study proposes mission requirements and a shortlist of optimal mission scenarios for a follow-on mission in this short time frame. The goal of such a new PROBA-V mission is clear: it should ensure the data continuity of global vegetation monitoring, while taking the opportunity to further improve the data quality. Data continuity is essential for understanding long term trends of land use that may affect the global equilibrium of the planet (in the context of scarcity for land or food, natural disasters, climate change). As for added value, a fine example is the improvement of spatial resolution when comparing PROBA-V with the spatial resolution in SPOT-VEGETATION products. An improvement in spatial resolution towards a full 100m product is considered by the user community as the main target for a PROBA-V follow-on mission

Systematic Data Reuse Exploration Methodology for Irregular Access Patterns

Efficient use of an optimized custom memory hierarchy to exploit temporal locality in the memory accesses on array signals can have a very large impact on the power consumption in embedded data dominated applications. Only recently effective formalized techniques to deal with this specific task have been addressed. They work well for homogeneous signal access patterns but cannot handle other cases. In this paper we will extend and parameterize the design space and establish heuristics for an efficient exploration, such that better results in terms of area and power can be achieved for applications where holes are present in the signal access pattern. The extended methodology will be illustrated for several real-life image processing algorithms. 1

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A FAMILY OF LIGHTWEIGHT AND WIDE SWATH UAV CAMERA SYSTEMS AROUND AN INNOVATIVE DUAL-SENSOR ON-SINGLE-CHIP DETECTOR

Together with a Belgian industrial consortium VITO has developed the lightweight camera system MEDUSA. It combines high spatial resolution with a wide swath to support missions for large scale mapping and disaster monitoring applications. MEDUSA has been designed to be operated on a solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicle flying in the stratosphere. The camera system contains a custom designed CMOS imager with 2 sensors (each having 10000 × 1200 pixels) on 1 chip. One sensor is panchromatic, one is equipped with colour filters. The MEDUSA flight model camera has passed an extensive test campaign and is ready to conduct its maiden flight. First airborne test flights with an engineering model version of the camera have been executed to validate the functionality and the performance of the camera. An image stitching work flow has been developed in order to generate an image composite in near real time of the acquired images. The unique properties of the dual-sensor-on-single-chip detector triggered the development of 2 new camera designs which are currently in preparation. MEDUSA-low is a modified camera system optimised for compatibility with more conventional UAV systems with a payload capacity of 5–10 kg flying at an altitude around 1 km. Its camera acquires both panchromatic and colour images. The MEDUSA geospectral camera is an innovative hyperspectral imager which is equipped with a spatially varying spectral filter installed in front of one of the two sensors. It acquires both hyperspectral and broad band high spatial resolution image data from one and the same camera