Saturday, May 30, 2015
Thursday, May 28, 2015
Friday, May 15, 2015
Opening the Hand-Held Aperture: Methods and Technology for Hand-held ISR
Red Hen Systems will be supporting the 2015 GeoInt Symposium. Find us at Booth 2089. Watch here for a number of new products and updates to old as we prepare for the Summer Solstice in DC with you…. Optical gas imaging, VR for Occulus, and other metadata stuff.
More details to follow ….
And a very exciting honor from USGIF for Red Hen this year… we have been given the responsibility to organize a two hour “educate and train” session for Mobile GeoINT Spatialists – aka those who use hand cameras and can do their own geotagging of the same – all pointographers and photogeographers welcome.
Attendees will receive 0.2 Continuing Education Units per session courtesy of Riverside Research, an IACET Authorized Provider and USGIF mission partner in STEM education. Sign up during registration!
TOPIC: Mobile GeoINT Opening the Hand-Held Aperture: Methods and Technology for Hand-held ISR—Traditions and Future
WHEN: Wednesday 0700 to 0900 - June 24th, 2015
WHO: Mobile GeoINT Spatialists – The “other” photographers
WHAT: Spatial imagery and critical infrastructure patrol – Hand-held FMV and NITS metadata encoding
What is Mobile GeoINT? Hand-held camera and dismounted full-motion video for directed imagery collected by the disconnected, moving content on the sneaker-net, using off-the-shelf cameras, collected by ad-hoc point-and-shootists as well as planned missions supporting spatialist abstraction from photogrammetric precision.
This session discusses mobile GEOINT by exploring how adding first-person viewpoints can be particularly useful. Participants will review the recent mobile geoint history in counter-narcotics, blending social media and robotic FMV, and near future MISB and NITS schema for VR immersion, panography, “photosyth” point cloud, citizen sensor and other topics for the Mobile GeoINT Spatialist.
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
LIDAR In the Clouds - ASPRS wants ESRI's “LAZ clone” to fade away?
Five Myths about “ESRI Optimized LAS”
1) Martin’s “LAZ” format is also proprietary.
Wrong. LAZ – just like LAS – is an open format. LAZ is defined by a well commented open reference implentation in C/C++ and described in a PE&RS paper published in February 2013. LAS is defined via a specification documentbut has no reference implementation. Both can be freely used by anyone and (re-)implemented on any operating system and in any programming language. For example, there is now a javascript version of LAZ that someone else created.
2) We have no argument because ESRI provides a free API for “Optimized LAS”.
Wrong. “Optimized LAS” can only be used via the mechanism, the programming language, and the operating system of ESRI’s choosing. This is the very definition of “proprietary format”. Here is what Wikipedia says:
A proprietary format is a file format of a company, organization, or individual that contains data that is ordered and stored according to a particular encoding-scheme, designed by the company or organization to be secret, such that the decoding and interpretation of this stored data is only easily accomplished with particular software or hardware that the company itself has developed. The specification of the data encoding format is not released, or underlies non-disclosure agreements.
In contrast an open format is a file format that is published and free to be used by everybody.
3) Martin’s “LAZ” format is only used by LAStools.
Wrong. Large parts of the LiDAR industry embrace LAZ and have added read & write support for the LAZ format using the open source code or the DLL. Examples are QT Modeler, Globalmapper, FME, Fugroviewer, ERDAS IMAGINE, ENVI LiDAR, Bentley Pointools, TopoDOT, FUSION, CloudCompare, Gexel R3, Pointfuse, …and many more. Notable exceptions are ArcGIS and the product line offered by Lewis Graham’s GeoCue group. We maintain an (incomplete) list of software with native LAZ support here.
4) ESRI has engineered “Optimized LAS” for the cloud and “LAZ” cannot compete.
Wrong. The extra functionality in “Optimized LAS” is a simple mash-up of LAZ with spatial indexing LAX, an optional spatial sort, and a few extra statistics. This is why ESRI’s format is also known as the “LAZ clone”. We were able to feature-match these minor engineering changes in an afternoon which – a few days later – resulted in this April Fools’ Day prank. In fact, LAZ has been used “in the cloud” for well over 4 years on OpenTopography – the first and probably the premier Web accessible LiDAR cloud service of our industry. It is also used by many other LiDAR download servers. We maintain an (incomplete) list of portals offering compressed LAZ is here.
5) ESRI’s “Optimized LAS” does not prevent people from using LAS.
ESRI is one of the largest GIS training organizations. If they teach hundreds of LiDAR novices to “optimize” their “unoptimized LAS” files while simultaneously lobbying large LiDAR providers into switching from LAS or LAZ to zLAS they will effectively destroy the current success of our open formats. Their command of the GIS market can – little by little – turn their own proprietry format into the dominant way in which LiDAR point clouds are exchanged. Then we loose our open exchange formats. Hence, ESRI’s proprietary “Optimized LAS” format “threatens” what we have achieved with LAS (and LAZ): open LiDAR data exchange and incredible LiDAR software interoperability.
This is by no means anti-ESRI campaign. We hope to work with ESRI to resolve this situation. Below an image from ESRI’s ArcNews Spring 2011 news letter about the importance of open formats, standards, and specifications …
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What all this means to me, MM, is a users' question. LiDAR makes 3D illustration measurements in new ways. The emerging 3D-ization to support geographic curiosity is magical and will only improve in its ability to "teleport/telepresense" ourselves. Light detection and rangin is complex to begin with, required hundreds of millions if not billions of our tax dollars for its DoD and DHS purposes, has a large cost in instrumentation and collection, and involves not just singular scientists but literally teams necessary to extract value from the data investment; should a dominating player of spatial analysis be able to intellectually capture this essence by small but proprietary schema? Suddenly you have a new partner in "your" data a sort of implicit taking of ownership or license? The dominate player is caught-up in how open is their open or my open in more open?
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Monday, May 11, 2015
Wyoming Criminalizes Citizen Environmental Reporting or Monitoring?
Forbidden Data
By Justin Pidot
Wyoming just criminalized citizen science.
Photo by Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images
Imagine visiting Yellowstone this summer. You wake up before dawn to take a picture of the sunrise over the mists emanating from Yellowstone hot springs. A thunderhead towers above the rising sun, and the picture turns out beautifully. You submit the photo to a contest sponsored by the National Weather Service. Under a statute signed into law by the Wyoming governor this spring, you have just committed a crime and could face up to one year in prison.
Wyoming doesn’t, of course, care about pictures of geysers or photo competitions. But photos are a type of data, and the new law makes it a crime to gather data about the condition of the environment across most of the state if you plan to share that data with the state or federal government. The reason? The state wants to conceal the fact that many of its streams are contaminated by E. coli bacteria, strains of which can cause serious health problems, even death.
Wyoming doesn’t, of course, care about pictures of geysers or photo competitions. But photos are a type of data, and the new law makes it a crime to gather data about the condition of the environment across most of the state if you plan to share that data with the state or federal government. The reason? The state wants to conceal the fact that many of its streams are contaminated by E. coli bacteria, strains of which can cause serious health problems, even death.
A small organization called Western Watersheds Project (which I represent pro bono in an unrelated lawsuit) has found the bacteria in a number of streams crossing federal land in concentrations that violate water quality standards under the federal Clean Water Act. Rather than engaging in an honest public debate about the cause or extent of the problem, Wyoming prefers to pretend the problem doesn't exist. And under the new law, the state threatens anyone who would challenge that belief by producing information to the contrary with a term in jail.
Why the desire for ignorance rather than informed discussion? The reason is pure politics. The source of E. coli is clear. It comes from cows spending too much time in and next to streams. Acknowledging that fact could result in rules requiring ranchers who graze their cows on public lands to better manage their herds. The ranching community in Wyoming wields considerable political power and has no interest in such obligations, so the state is trying to stop the flow of information rather than forthrightly address the problem.
Why the desire for ignorance rather than informed discussion? The reason is pure politics. The source of E. coli is clear. It comes from cows spending too much time in and next to streams. Acknowledging that fact could result in rules requiring ranchers who graze their cows on public lands to better manage their herds. The ranching community in Wyoming wields considerable political power and has no interest in such obligations, so the state is trying to stop the flow of information rather than forthrightly address the problem.
The Wyoming law transforms a good Samaritan who volunteers her time to monitor our shared environment into a criminal. Idaho and Utah, as well as other states, have also enacted laws designed to conceal information that could damage their agricultural industries—laws currently being challenged in federal court. But Wyoming is the first state to enact a law so expansive that it criminalizes taking a picture on public land.
The new law is of breathtaking scope. It makes it a crime to “collect resource data” from any “open land,” meaning any land outside of a city or town, whether it’s federal, state, or privately owned. The statute defines the word collect as any method to “preserve information in any form,” including taking a “photograph” so long as the person gathering that information intends to submit it to a federal or state agency. In other words, if you discover an environmental disaster in Wyoming, even one that poses an imminent threat to public health, you’re obliged, according to this law, to keep it to yourself.
Anyone with a passing familiarity with our Constitution will recognize that the Wyoming law is unconstitutional. It runs afoul of the supremacy clause because it interferes with the purposes of federal environmental statutes by making it impossible for citizens to collect the information necessary to bring an enforcement lawsuit. The Wyoming law also violates the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech because it singles out speech about natural resources for burdensome regulation and makes it a crime to engage in a variety of expressive and artistic activities. And finally, it specifically criminalizes public engagement with federal and state agencies and therefore violates another right guaranteed by the First Amendment: the right to petition the government.
By enacting this law, the Wyoming legislature has expressed its disdain for the freedoms protected by the First Amendment and the environmental protections enshrined in federal statutes. Today, environmentally conscious citizens face a stark choice: They can abandon efforts to protect the lands they love or face potential criminal charges. The United States government should not sit idly by. It should plainly express its disapproval of this law. Ideally, this would entail the U.S. Department of Justice filing a lawsuit to invalidate the Wyoming law, much as it did when it challenged Arizona’s state immigration law as unconstitutional.
At the very least, the federal agencies that manage public lands should issue written statements providing express permission for citizen scientists to continue their efforts to protect our shared environment.
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Wooden Nickel Positional Accuracy for a Dime?
Affordable Centimeter-Accurate GPS Developed
GPS technologies are constantly improving and expanding. When first launched, GPS provided accuracy within several hundred feet. Then, when Selective Availability ended, accuracy skyrocketed literally overnight to a few meters. Now, a research team at the Cockrel School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin has found a way to increase that accuracy to a few centimeters without increasing the cost. The catch is that this new technology was funded by Samsung and therefore is designed specifically for smartphones.
This article focuses on single-frequency CDGNSS rather than multiple-frequency CDGNSS or other carrier-phase-based techniques, such as precise-point positioning (PPP), for three reasons. First, virtually all smartphones are equipped with single-frequency GNSS antennas tuned to the L1 band centered at 1575.42 MHz, and single-frequency CDGNSS will likely forever remain the cheapest option. Second, as compared to PPP, CDGNSS converges much faster to centimeter accuracy, which will be important for impatient smartphone users.Finally, as centimeter-accurate GNSS moves into the mass market, GNSS reference stations will proliferate so that the vast majority of users can expect to be within a few kilometers of one. In this so-called short baseline regime, the differential ionospheric delay between the reference and mobile receivers becomes insignificant, obviating differential delay estimation via multi-frequency measurements. Of course, the additional signal measurements produced by multiple-frequency receivers would lead to faster convergence times and improved robustness, but for many applications, single-frequency measurements will be adequate.
I know what you’re probably thinking. Centimeter-accurate devices are already available right now. IN fact, centimeter-accurate positioning devices are commonly used in several different fields including geology, mapping and surveying. However, these survey-grade antennas are a too large to use with a mobile device, and the antennas and equipment is pretty expensive. The researchers wanted to create a super accurate system that was affordable so that everyone could use it.
I’m not an expert on the hardware that goes into GPS and smartphones, so I’m not going to try and explain to you exactly how it works. But, basically what it sounds like is that the device uses the sensors already included in most smartphones alongside the existing GPS technology in order to decrease the range from an area the size of a car to the area the size of a nickel. You can check out the article in GPS World or the ARS Technica article to get a better idea of the technical side of it.
What’s of more interest to me is the ramifications of a technology like this. The research team listed off things that they believe the technology to be useful for—mostly gaming, because they are college students, as well as virtual reality. However, the first thing that comes to my mind is the use of drones and other similar things. I wouldn’t think that the FAA would be able to argue if you could land a drone within centimeters of a target without any difficulty. Self-driving cars suddenly don’t sound quite as scary—the possibilities are endless, especially if the technology can be replicated outside of the use of a smartphone (which I am sure is possible).
Right now, this is still in the research phase and is not commercially available, although theEureka Alert! article stated that the professor and his students have created a new startup called Radiosense and there are plans to build a clip-on accessory for smartphones to leverage this centimeter-accurate positioning technology.
Sunday, May 3, 2015
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