Contact: Bob Ratliff
Success in making a picture worth more than the proverbial thousand words is winning international recognition for a Mississippi State research team.
A mathematical approach university scientists regularly use to sharpen satellite images of the earth recently won first place in a first-ever data fusion contest organized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' at its 2000 International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.
The mathematical approach, or algorithm, was developed by electrical and computer engineering professor Roger King and computer engineering graduate student Jianwen Wang. Its purpose is to improve the visual and spatial quality of aerial and satellite images while keeping important data that can be used to gather information about land use, vegetation, moisture, and other characteristics of an area.
The key to the process is pixel size or resolution. The smaller an area covered by a pixel --the tiny dots or squares that make up a photographic or video image--the sharper and more recognizable it will be.
Because satellites often collect data about an area in several parts of the light spectrum at different pixel resolutions, King said several channels of light spectrum data are required "because information about the earth's environment is contained in both the visible and invisible part of the light spectrum."
King said primacy of MSU algorithms in the competition resulted from its ability to successfully "fuse" the high and low resolution channels without changing the light-spectrum data necessary for assessing the characteristics of an area.
"For the contest, we were asked to sharpen an image of the town of Hasselt, Belgium, taken by the Landsat 7 satellite," King said.
"The image we generated enhanced such man-made things as roads and bridges, while keeping the data necessary for obtaining environmental and other information about the area's natural characteristics," he added.
King and students under his direction work regularly with MSU's Remote Sensing Technology and National Science Foundation Engineering Research centers. Their expertise is employed to enhance aerial photos of forests, agricultural areas and roadways in Mississippi and other parts of the United States.
"Data fusion is used to help determine such things as the impact of land-use changes on vegetation and insect populations," King said. "Since it can be used for enhancing roads and bridges, data fusion also can be applied to transportation systems and urban planning."
The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, a professional organization of more than 350,000 members in 150 countries, is a leading authority in matters of computer engineering, biomedical technology and telecommunications, and related technical areas.
This year's geoscience and remote sensing symposium was held in Honolulu, Hawaii.