Researchers from the University of Southern California (USC) and Geosemble Technologies are improving Air Force situational awareness with software that presents vast amounts of map data in a more manageable format
Using funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), Dr. Craig Knoblock and his team developed a computerized method for aligning maps with satellite imagery. The result combined the visual appeal of photographs with the attribution information found on maps.
While the idea was not new, the old method required a person to manually identify a set of control points to register a map with an image. This process, though tedious, was able to account for a variety of map designs and their inherent differences.
The key to Knoblock's work was finding an automated method that could also account for these differences. First, he and his team looked for the most comprehensive way to process maps for gathering needed data. Next, they investigated how to relate that extracted data to satellite images. The resulting solution uses road vector to mold the two formats together.
"The idea is to automatically extract the road intersections on a map and use the layout of those intersections to find the corresponding area on the satellite imagery," Knoblock explained. "We chose to pursue this topic because there is so much valuable information contained in maps and it seems like a great opportunity to be able to make that information more easily available."
Basic research funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) has led to the development of software for aligning maps with satellite imagery called MapStrata. Pictured above, Cyrus Shahabi (left), Jason Chen (center), and Craig Knoblock (right) from Geosemble Technologies review the latest version.
(Photo Credit: Image courtesy of Dr. Craig Knoblock, University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute)
Air Force planners now have the ability to integrate maps quickly and automatically with the latest aerial and satellite imagery for a given area, thereby creating context and situational awareness for better and faster decision-making.
Currently, Geosemble is developing a partnership with a defense contractor that will allow them to integrate their capability -- called MapStrata -- as a plug-in with an existing software suite used by the Air Force. They then plan to continue adding new capabilities to the existing software, including an export to database feature.