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MSU TechLink Brokers R&D Project Between Whitefish Company and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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January 12, 1998
BOZEMAN, Mont. - A Helena company has just begun a cooperative research project with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
The company, Integrated Geoscience, Inc. (IGI), specializes in geographic information system (GIS) technology for natural resource management and environmental analysis. The Montana company established the partnership with JPL through TechLink, a NASA-sponsored technology transfer and commercialization center at MSU-Bozeman.
The project involves new "automated feature recognition software" being developed by IGI, which can recognize and map selected features in remotely sensed imagery such as satellite images. IGI's software has a novel machine-learning method that enables it to "learn" to identify specific features in digital images. This software has obvious relevance to NASA, which is faced with the task of interpreting large sets of planetary and terrestrial imagery.
The cooperative project will enable JPL and IGI to jointly evaluate IGI's software for NASA's mission-related purposes and co-develop improved software features. According to Will Swearingen, TechLink Project Manager, who helped establish the collaboration, "Through this project, NASA gains access to Integrated Geoscience's advanced software, which will help it to analyze images of space and Planet Earth. Integrated Geoscience gains the opportunity to validate its software and will benefit from NASA's specialized expertise in image analysis, which will help it to develop a better commercial product."
Project activities are centering on "extracting" small rural roads from black-and-white 5-meter resolution digital imagery of the western United States. Most of these roads are narrow, unimproved dirt roads and are difficult to distinguish in the imagery. Software capable of mapping these roads will have many commercial and NASA-related applications. Anticipated commercial applications include automated mapping of buildings, roads, streams, and forest clearcuts; quicker integration of remotely sensed imagery into GIS databases; and rapid detection of changes in land cover or land use. The IGI software will facilitate use of imagery from the coming generation of high-resolution commercial satellites.
According to IGI President, Stuart Blundell, "The single greatest challenge facing planners and natural resource managers today is integrating and interpreting the vast amounts of data available. New commercial remote sensing satellites will provide an unprecedented flow of highly detailed information about the earth's surface. We hope to automate the process of extracting features from this data for inclusion into decision-support systems, such as GIS. This will go a long way toward improving decisions regarding land use, development planning, watershed management, and environmental monitoring." TechLink is continuing to work with IGI to identify opportunities to commercialize the new feature extraction software.
Sample Image
Contact:
Will Swearingen
MSU TechLink,
(406) 994-7704
wds@montana.edu
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