CCNY Lecture Series on Computer Vision, Robotics and Human-Computer Interaction

Title: Airborne Remote Sensing – Applications, Systems and Algorithms

Abstract

Airborne remote sensing systems are widely used for commercial mapping and are becoming important for environmental monitoring and security applications. Military systems have been used for observation and planning. These applications typically have time lags from days to weeks. Currently systems are being developed for real-time applications, which impose difficult requirements on processing and communications. This talk will describe collection systems that are being utilized at the Rochester Institute of Technology for remote sensing collection and real-time exploitation for applications such as wildfire monitoring, environmental monitoring and security applications.

Systems include multispectral framing cameras, a hyperspectral scanner and a video rate multispectral system. Algorithms are required for image registration, georectification, and multi-sensor fusion. Exploitation tasks include target detection and scene modeling. Real-time requirements have imposed the necessity to construct automated airborne process work flows, which we have implemented using a novel airborne data processor architecture. The talk will address systems and algorithms for wildfire detection and automated scene modeling.

Biography

Dr. Harvey Rhody received a BSEE from the University of Wisconsin (1962), MSEE from the University of Cincinnati (1965) and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Syracuse University (1969). He is currently a professor of imaging science in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science and director of the Laboratory for Imaging Algorithms and Systems. He has been at RIT in various capacities since 1970, including professor of electrical engineering, department head of electrical engineering and president of RIT Research Corporation. He teaches and does research in the area of imaging systems, algorithms and applications. He is currently principal investigator on project to automate construction of scene models from airborne sensor data; on a project to construct an automated wildfire detection system; and a project to construct a hyperspectral analysis toolbox for NGA applications. He is an IEEE life member and currently the program chair for the upcoming AIPR-2006 workshop on model-based image analysis.