WASP's mission is the detection and monitoring of wildfires from an aircraft at an altitude of up to 12,000 feet. WASP is currently flown from a Piper Aztec aircraft. WASP is adaptable for other Infrared or visible remote sensing applications as well. It consists of three infrared cameras and one visible camera, and can georeference and generate data products and then send them down to the ground station while the aircraft is still flying over the target area.
WASP has three Phoenix IR and one Terrapix visible imagers mounted in a pivoting gimbal assembly. This assembly looks down through a hole in the aircraft. It also has positioning devices to determine the exact position and orientation of the imagers and aircraft when each image is captured.
The IR imagers cover three bands in the infrared; short, mid and longwave. They aquire 640x512 12 bit images. The Terrapix aquires 2048x2048 unbayered raw images over roughly the same space on the ground.
The above four images illustrate the range of the four imaging instruments in WASP. The image to the left shows what this same terrain looks like in the visible spectrum. As you can see, the smoke completely obscures what's really going on, making a fire like this one potentially difficult and dangerous to fight.
The other three images show the same scene in the three infrared bands. As you can see, the outline of the heat of the fire is obvious and distinct. Since these images are geo-located, we know exactly where that fire perimeter is in latitude and longitude. Also, since these are infrared, we can get the same image products in the daytime or at nighttime.
The entire assembly can acquire one frame every 4 seconds. This combined with the pivoting of the aircraft means that we can get high resolution imagery of an entire city in roughly 20 minutes in two passes with the aircraft.
The image data aquired is also passed through a georectification prcess in realtime, which allows us to produce tiled imagery like you can see in the image to the left. This was the result of two legs in one flight we did over Rochester, NY.
All four cameras are also aligned and corrolated together so that the 6 bands of image data aquired (3 IR, Red, Green, Blue) can be processed together. This means that certain features and behaviors of ground-based events can be detected.
They are assocated to eachother using the data from various positioning equipment including an IMU, GPS receiver and an Applanix processing module.
The image seen to the right is a small excerpt of the above image, which illustrates some of the detail we can get from a quick mission.
This imagery and data can also be sent down to a base station where immediate science can be done. This also allows for ground teams to apply this information into their processes.
Our portable base station trailer contains communications equipment, data processing computers, space for scientists and operators to work, and all of the maintenance hardware and tools needed for remote flights. It has both battery and generator power, and can operate in remote locations.
The base station provides multiple computers for the distributed processing of the data, for operators to control the system, or for analyists to use the data products.
WASP runs custom software in the aircraft running on a server-class machine. This system of hardware and software is called the Airborne Data Processor, or "ADP".
The ADP is a distributed collection of software modules which include image acquisition, image processing, geo rectification, and data logging. It also consists of a GUI application which allows the in-flight operator, as well as an operator at the base station to observe the output from the system, and control system operations.
We have made available two movies that show this application in action. These show what it would look like if you were to receive image data from the aircraft during a flight.
There is also a second application which is run at the base station, which can show the current aircraft location, basic system health, and geo-located image coverage. It also draws a line on provided map image data showing the path of the aircraft.
All elements of our ADP system are designed such that you can reproduce and re-run any part of any flight later with the use of simulators. This allows us to try out new software modules and algorithms as if they were running in the aircraft. This allows us for a huge amount of flexibility in that we can re-run and provide data in a simulated "live" capacity for students to test algorithms or just to try out new software procedures without needing the expensive flight times.
WASP was designed to detect fires of various sizes from a flight over the target area. The above images show three charcoal pits that were set up for a test flight.
The result image to the right show the infrared imagery taken of this scene from 5000 ft. The spots in red show where the fire detection algorithm detected fires. Three of the red spots in the center of the image are the above charcoal targets.
WASP can be used for many other scientific applications as well. It can detect warm people in cold water, along with wake shadows or thermal scars of passing boats in bodies of water, as they stir up colder or warmer water underneath them. WASP can be used for locating almost any thermal based event.
Since flights can be done quickly on demand, and since the time to process the data is short, we can also produce time-based data products like the animation seen to the right. This animation shows a fire progressing across a very hilly area of land. These images also show how our software can drape the imagery over terrain.
The image data aquired is geo-located, so we can also apply or overlay data from other sources to it using standard tools. By simply applying standard GIS street data to it, we can see how we can use our data products to assist with disasters and other events.
The image to the right shows streets and roads overlayed as red lines.