(7-Feb-2010) RIT aerial mapping helps Haiti

From the Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, NY:

http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20100207/BUSINESS/2070335/1001

RIT aerial mapping helps Haiti

Tom Tobin
Staff writer

Haiti's horror is all ground-level calamity: street scene after street scene of crushed buildings, ruined lives and desperate survivors.

But the vantage point that may mean the most to this broken country — in its reconstruction and rebirth — is that of a small plane soaring overhead.

The plane, which did seven days of flyovers of Haiti following the Jan. 12 quake, was equipped with state-of-the-art imaging and laser technology that the Rochester Institute of Technology had a major hand in developing and making available to United Nations relief teams, the World Bank, the U.S. Geological Survey and others.

This is the sort of technology woven into Rochester's fabric — high-resolution color imaging — that in this case was married to a rapid-pulse laser. The result was images more 3-D, and more essential, than anything viewers of Avatar might have experienced.

From the belly of the plane, RIT researchers and others could take high-resolution, infrared, heat-sensitive images, and use the laser simultaneously to add depth and breadth to each picture.

The results were used by institutions like the World Bank to determine the nature of the structural failures and the extent of the rebuilding efforts ahead, and by earthquake-watchers like the U.S. Geological Survey to examine Haiti's topology.

But there was an even more pressing value to the imagery. Once the pictures began to flow into RIT's special processing center at the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science — 12,000 3-D photos on the first day alone — it became clear that relief teams could use them to get around maddening traffic gridlock or to identify neighborhoods where the need was greatest.

"We could see from the plane that trucks with supplies were lined up on the airport tarmac, unable to move out onto the road," Jason Faulring, a 2003 RIT graduate and staff researcher who flew alongside employees of Kucera International, which developed the LIDAR laser sensing system.

The flyover crew shot so many images with such precision that the United Nations, mired in a slow-moving recovery effort and facing criticism, saw in them a way to avoid obstacles and to pinpoint critical problems more quickly.

"One of the great things about this effort is that we've put the images on the Web so people can see this for themselves," said Don McKeown, Carlson Center scientist. Data are made available to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, USGS, ERDAS, Virtual Disaster Viewer (VDV) at University at Buffalo and UN-SPIDER.

McKeown was project manager for the Haiti flyovers and image processing. He was instrumental in bringing together RIT researchers, Kucera and ImageCat Inc., a company that helped secure funding for the World Bank for the effort.

RIT students at the Carlson center were — and still are — heavily involved in the long hours and days of gathering and processing the flyover images transmitted electronically from the plane crew.

Each day the crew would take off from Puerto Rico, refuel in the Dominican Republic, spend hours in the air over Haiti taking pictures and then return to Puerto Rico to send the images back to Rochester.

"The students' job was to process the enormous number of images as they came in and to deal with the computer problems that tend to arise when things of this magnitude are done," McKeown said. "They were a key part of the effort."

"A diverse skill set was required here to make this work, from scientists to engineers to the students," said Jan van Aardt, associate professor of imaging science at RIT.

Faulring's back in Rochester, but the experience is fresh in his mind.

"It was kind of surreal. We could see people setting up tent cities, we saw them living in the medians of highways," he said.

"And when the aftershocks hit, even from our height we could see the ripples on the water below."

TTOBIN@DemocratandChronicle.com

To see some of the images from the RIT project, go to http://ipler.cis.rit.edu/projects/haiti.