Development of a GPS - Linked Airborne Video System

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Airborne video has demonstrated promise as a rapid, low-cost means of acquiring imagery for a variety of ecological applications: fish and wildlife habitat, plant communities, phytomass determination, crop damage, weed infestations. Image acquisition can be timed to coincide with an event of interest (e.g., a flood, an algae bloom) at a spatial scale suitable for detecting objects as small as individual organisms (e.g., trees, geese). The benefits of airborne video could be greatly enhanced, however, by combining frame-grabbed video images into a comprehensive geo-referenced database suitable for use in a Geographic Information System (GIS) where the information could be integrated with other spatial databases (e.g., population density, land ownership) and manipulated using the multitude of spatial analysis tools inherent to GISs. Therefore, the goal of this award is to develop a prototype airborne video database acquisition system capable of: 1) gathering all the information needed to georeference a video image at the moment of acquisition, 2) displaying in real time the spatial extent and location of images acquired, and 3) selecting images for analysis and mosaicing them into a comprehensive GIS coverage.