Remote Sensing Instrument Technology

Automatic Coregistration and Change Detection of Multi-Temporal Panoramas for Safety Assessment of Highway Slopes [ 下載 PDF ]

Tomoya Matsuo, Cheng-Chien Liu

The broken terrain and frequent earthquakes, together with the heavy precipitation during the rainy and typhoon seasons, pose a grave threat to slope stability in Taiwan. As a result, slope disasters are frequently found along the highways in mountainous area and seriously endanger Taiwan's lifeline of transportation and economy. The traditional approach for highway maintenance relies on patrolmen to visually screening the slopes from the ground or the patrol vehicle. Such an approach, however, requires considerable manpower and time, yet provides very limited information on spatial coverage. Lacking of an objective and quantitative comparison between the latest observations to the historical one, there is no way to diagnose the subtle yet progressive signs of slope disasters. This research employs two panorama videos of New Central Cross-Island Highway, taken on 20 April 2011 and 22 November 2011, respectively. A total of 14 sites with high risk of slope disasters are identified and selected. The multi-temporal panoramas of each site are extracted from the videos for change detection. Since the accurate GPS and IMU data were not recorded in an ordinary petrol vehicle, and these two videos were not taken from the same viewing angles along the same route, we integrate three approaches to coregister the multi-temporal panoramas. First, the adaptive enhancement is applied to the multi-temporal panoramas and scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) approach is used to generate a set of key points. These key points are examined by both the crosscorrelation (CC) approach and the phase-correlation (PC) approach, with the intention to fill out those problematic points. Based on these robust key points, the PC approach is used again to generate a large number of tie points and each point is double checked with CC approach. With the large amount of accurate tie points, the multi-temporal panoramas can be accurately coregistered to meet the requirements of change detection. The results demonstrate that the difference between the coregistered multi-temporal panoramas provides reliable and quantitative information of subtle changes on highway slopes. This processing can be carried out in a fully automatic fashion, which is an innovative and low-cost approach to assess the safety of highway slopes.

Design and Development of Shrouded Quadrotor and Application in Remote Sensing [ 下載 PDF ]

Wei-Hsiang Lai, Jiun-Hau Tarn, Rong-Tarn Liu, Zao-Sin Lan, Chiun-Chie Lin, Wei-Te Chuang

The news of disasters were reported frequently, including earth quake, typhoon, flooding, etc. The local situation at the disasters is the most important information to be known by the rescue personnel. It is proved as an effective method even better than satellite and manned aircraft to utilize unmanned vehicle to transfer images from the disaster area to collect more information before and during the action of salvage. However, most unmanned vehicle of multi-axis rotors can't sustain strong wind and raining weathers, which will be limited in its utilization during the investigation. This research is aimed to develop a shrouded quadrotor which may be used in a certain circumstance of wind and rain by proving its performance from the designed 5-grade wind and rain condition. This can be used in the future disaster prevention, monitoring, ocean/forest data collection and protection, and reconnaissance/broadcast from many disaster areas, and enhance the performance of rescuing action.

Developed One Step Procedure of Calibration for MEMS IMU with Vehicle Applications [ 下載 PDF ]

Jhen-Kai Liao, Kai-Wei Chiang

The Inertial Measuring Unit (IMU) has been used in many applications in our life. However, the accuracy of IMU limited where they can be used. The Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) IMU is low cost but also low accuracy. The common ways to improve the accuracy of IMU are calibration and Allan Variance. The calibration can determine the systematic errors like bias, scale factor and non-orthogonality from accelerometers and gyros. The Allan variance can analyze the random errors include Angle Random walk (ARW), Velocity Random walk (VRW) and so on. The results of Allan variance can determine the parameters of those random errors with Power Spectral Density (PSD). There are only few researches about calibration and error analysis in Taiwan. The Taiwanese civil users have no ability to test and correct the IMU used in Mobile Mapping System (MMS) and other applications when some problems happened. The MEMS IMU we used didn't do any error compensations and usually used in smartphone. The purpose is to develop one step calibration scheme and also the analysis of Allan variance for MEMS IMU. The field tests are used to verify the performance of IMU after calibration.

Marine Environment Multi-Spectral Imager of Satellite Scientifi c Payload [ 下載 PDF ]

Shih-Chieh Chou, Chien-Hung Chen, Po-Han Huang, Rui-Cian Weng, Tai-Shan Liao, Ting-Ming Huang

The purpose of this feasibility research, Marine Environment Multi-spectral Imager of Satellite Scientifi c Payload (MEMI), is to domestically develop a new generation of marine environment multi-spectral imager by referring to the technique materials from the ocean color imager (OCI) payload of FORMOSAT-1. The MEMI payload will achieve 500 m spatial resolution and 8 spectral characteristics. The power consumption is 7.5 W (average) and the mass is 7.5 Kg which meets the specifi cation of scientific payloads. The performance of the new generation MEMI is superior to that of FORMOSAT-1 which can achieve 800 m spatial resolution and 6 spectral characteristics. The MEMI can be used to systematically and long-term monitor the marine environment near the coast around Taiwan. The entire opto-mechatronic system design and manufacture is independently developed by the domestic research group in Taiwan. This feasibility validation of the project is expected to be completed in one year.

Applications of Mobile Mapping System in Road Information Extraction [ 下載 PDF ]

Tee-Ann Teo, Yi-No Lien, Fuan Tsai, Chieh-Tsung Chen

Mobile Mapping System (MMS) is a cost-effective way to acquire spatial data. It also provides detailed and high accurate point cloud. As the need for urban planning, navigation and Location Based Service (LBS) are increasing, how to extract the information of the road becomes the important research. For this reason, the purpose of this study is extracting the road points from the mobile lidar points cloud, and then obtaining the geometrical information of the road. The research has three major parts. There are data pre-processing, road point extraction and verifi cation. In data pre-processing, in order to avoid dealing with all data, point clouds are divided into several road parts. Then, we select the lowest point as potential ground point from all points using elevation threshold. Next, we use the cubic curve fi tting and point-to-curve distance to extract road points. It can remove non-ground points like cars and pedestrians. Finally, we provide manual edited digital elevation model (DEM) and ground check points to verify the result.

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Development and Application of Flow Chemistry [ 下載 PDF ]

Zhi-Geng Chen, Yu-Peng Hu, Shang-Cheng Hung

The increasing environmental awareness leads to a rethinking of ways on how to reduce the harm done to nature. This perception has gradually been brought into the field of chemistry, launching the study of Green Chemistry. Green Chemistry aims to reduce the release of harmful substances and allow reactions to achieve maximum efficiency in the production process by fully utilizing raw materials and energy. To meet these challenges, flow chemistry tools have been developed. Originally used in the petrochemical field but applied in the laboratory only nearly a decade ago, flow chemistry can effectively improve heat/mass transfer opportunities, decrease the solvent usage, lessen waste generation, and make a working regime a possibility. This technique has been applied in drug development and natural product synthesis in nowadays, overcoming many problems caused by conventional batch reactors. Here, we introduce the principles and advantages of flow chemistry and some successful examples on the applications.

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Ambient Ionization Mass Spectrometry: On-Site Detection of Tainted Chemical Compounds in Foods [ 下載 PDF ]

Min-Zong Huang, Sy-Chyi Cheng, Chu-Nian Cheng, Siou-Sian Jhang, Jentaie Shiea

Several novel outlooks and concepts for mass spectrometric ionization have been introduced in the last ten years, some of which have revolutionized the field of mass spectrometry. One of these novelties is known as ambient mass spectrometry (AMS), which is generally defined as 'mass spectrometric ionization methods that operate under ambient conditions and require minimal or no sample pretreatment'. Ambient MS allows direct, rapid, insitu, real-time, and high-throughput analyses of a wide range of substances from various surfaces and matrices, and drastically improves the capabilities of mass spectrometry. This paper introduces the principle and instrumentation of the ambient ionization techniques which can be used in detecting trace tainted chemical compounds in foods.

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Nanomolding of Nano-Structured Biodegradable Scaffolds [ 下載 PDF ]

I-Cheng Chung, Gou-Jen Wang

In this study, we demonstrate a replica mold fabrication method for nano-hemisphere arrays nanomolding by nickel electroforming using the highly ordered nano-hemisphere array of the barrier-layer surface of an anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) membrane as the master mold. The feature size of the nano-hemispheres can be controlled by the use of different etching solutions for anodic oxidation of aluminum. Using the nickel replica mold, nano-structured tissue engineering scaffolds in poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA), polylactide (PLA), and chitosan were fabricated by casting.