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Sensor Enables 3D Mapping of Rainforests
rhettb writes with an article about a fancy mapping sensor. Quoting Mongobay: "High above the Amazon rainforest in Peru, a team of scientists is conducting an ambitious experiment: a biological survey of a never-before-explored tract of remote and inaccessible cloud forest. They are doing so using an advanced system that enables them to map the three-dimensional physical structure of the forest as well as its chemical and optical properties. ... This sensor — built by engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory — is the first of its kind. The spectrometer can detect dozens of signals such as photosynthetic pigment concentrations, water content of leaves, defense compounds like phenols, and structural compounds such as lignin and cellulose. These signals can build signatures to distinguish individual plant species as well as other measures of forest condition."
Cool! What format do you save this data to allowing you to analyze it?
Hyperspectral imaging (viewing electromagnetic radiation across a much wider wavelength/frequency range than the human eye can see) is one of these things that just boggles the mind with the possibilities. For a system to be able to simultaneously "see" in far IR or even terahertz or microwaves, all the way up to X- and gamma-rays.... Well, it's like Predator. But doing cool things like monitoring the health of rainforests or quickly identifying explosives.
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So how did you get around the part where they say the cloud forest is remote and inaccessible?
Maybe your visual system works but your reading comprehension system needs an upgrade.
Now we can watch in fine-grained detail as the forests disappear.
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You have spectrometers built into your eyes? I wasn't aware that Geordi LaForge posted here.
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You tiny little life forms! (beep beep beep)
You precious little life forms(beep,snap,clap)
Where are you?" (beep beep beep beep beep beep, bebebeep!)
Your visual system does NOT do 3D mapping of anything. It does some model fitting from a stereoscopic image, and cannot do most of what their sensor platform does. You're either horribly misinformed or just trolling.
The forest they looked at would be about as accessible in terms of location accessibility to a human eye as it is to their platform: they fly a plane over the forest. Their sensor platform is mounted on a plane.
Alas, it's silly to think a human could be as effective as their sensor platform, because their platform has access to way more data than human visual system does. Not only do the spectrometers sense well into the infrared (2um), but the LIDAR system also measures 3D distribution of biomass, and the relief of the underlying terrain. They can see freaking old riverbed right through the trees, while also seeing the tree canopies. The latter image is not a photograph, mind you. It is a visualization, or reconstruction, of the LIDAR and spectral data.
In the "good old days", when all you had was your eyes and a theodolite, you'd need a lengthy and risky expedition on the ground to acquire all that 3D data manually -- and that works well only for ground relief. We're not monkeys.
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You mean that they sold off their alpha or beta platform?
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
LIDAR and fog do not play well together. Every time you get to the edge of a cloud you get a reflection. One solution is to combine RADAR and lidar. RADAR to cut through the fog and give you an approximation of the hard surface distance and then pick out the strongest LIDAR reflection within the RADAR's error range. Cheap and easy to do, but no one seems to do it. We are talking tiny, fit in a tea cup, ranging radar not some huge nav radar.
A cloud forest, also called a fog forest, is a generally tropical or subtropical evergreen montane moist forest characterized by a persistent, frequent or seasonal low-level cloud cover, usually at the canopy level. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_forest
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JPL is NOT a NASA center. Why is that so hard to get into people? JPL is a division of Caltech. The people there have contracts that say they work for Caltech. They get paychecks from Caltech.
JPL had hardware in Earth's orbit before NASA even existed.
JPL does a lot of work for NASA (i.e work where NASA is a customer - think Mars rovers etc) but at all times, some fraction of JPLs work is non-NASA. Has always been. The fraction has historically varied. Especially in the sensors, detectors and instrumentation side of the house, the fraction of non-NASA projects can easily exceed 50%. Yes, that includes DOD customers, but a lot of people appear to forget NOAA (who do you think invents all those clever weather satellites?) and a host of smaller research organizations (like, in this case, Carnegie) who simply need the best of whatever device they're looking for.
JPL is not cheap - if you want cheap, go somewhere else. But if you need something that measures subtle signals (like distinguishing individual types/genus/species of underbrush from each other from aircraft altitude to identify and monitor invasive species) in adverse conditions for years at a time, then JPL is probably the go-to shop. And no, it is not "NASA's JPL" and yes, your money is just as welcome as anybody else's.
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Except for the fact that there's no Web Enablement and as far as I can see his new sensor doesn't follow any OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) Standards, so the data itself isn't really that valuable outside his own application.
It might be something they'll add in the future, but I'd be interested to see how this data could be used, as opposed to how it can be collected. Quite frankly, LiDAR has been around for a long time, and attaching other sensors in conjunction with it isn't something entirely new. I will admit though that being able to get to an inaccessible place and map it is good, but the data is generally only as good as the application it is used in, and vice versa.
Just my 2 cents.
I heard they spent a week trying to track down a bug where large chunks of the rainforest would simply disappear--and then they realized it wasn't a bug...
When someone says, "Any fool can see
Infrared-dark clothing and camouflage net is already regular military standard. Hyperspectral imaging is already used; the government claimed that it was used to help find Osama bin Laden.
Nice work, but this is hardly the first of its kind...
A friend of a friend invented this concept while working at the CSIRO(those guys that invented the good wi-fi), in Australia.
He was even on a local show called "The New Inventers" where he showed it off, about 4 years ago, for the record.
This JPL model is definitely bigger, and badder, but NASA/JPL could have saved millions of dollars if they had a good look around every once in a while, or didn't fall asleep in front of the TV...
Credit where credit is dew. http://www.eoc.csiro.au/vsis/lidhome.htm