CCRI: Planning: Development of a Community Resource for Digital Image Research

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This project is concerned with research on very large digital images. Although image recognition tools are now commonplace for standard definition images, there is a lack of tools and techniques for analyzing very high resolution images (hundreds of millions of pixels per image). There are many important applications that would be well-served by the ability to automatically search such images, especially in cases where the properties of the search target aren't even fully known. Research of this nature is complicated by the fact that images of this size do not lend themselves well to the type of software tools that have been successful in standard-resolution image processing techniques such as handwriting or facial recognition. Data quantity alone is a major limitation; training a robust image recognition tool may require tens of thousands of images; at 100 million pixels per image, the sheer quantity of data becomes an issue for storing, sharing, and processing. New innovations will be required in machine learning, data provenance and warehousing, cloud computing, and image compression, all of which will serve the national interest.The specific purpose of this project is to (a) build a community of stakeholders who have vested interests in innovations in high resolution image processing and (b) create a roadmap for future research. Specifically, the researchers will reach out to relevant groups across academia, industry, and not-for-profit consortia with the goal of building a robust community with diverse expectations. This community will engage in a series of workshops to define the goals and scope of a high definition image processing consortium. The workshops will seek to define data standards, image processing goals, standardized data sets, and best practices for sharing and computing images at the petabyte scale. These findings will be leveraged into a future project whose goal will be to actually build the tools and perform the research that has been road-mapped by this project.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.