Geospatial Engineering in the Caribbean

This week myself and Neil Harris from the Geospatial Engineering group are participating in the second Technical workshop of the Cariwig project. Participants from the Climate Research Unit at UEA, the University of the West Indies Climate Studies Group, the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre in Belize and representatives from the Instituto de Meteorología, Cuba have been discussing how best to use the web based climate data, analysis and visualisations tools developed by Neil and myself to create impactful case studies to show decision makers the potential impact of climate change across a variety of Caribbean countries and sectors.

A follow up meeting later this year will provide training in the web based tools to a large number of stakeholders in the region.

Wavelength 14 – laser quest will never be the same again…..

From the 14th to the 16th April the annual RSPSoc Wavelength conference, aimed at students and young professionals to present their work to their fellow peers in an informal environment, was hosted among the quaint hills of Great Malvern, Worcestershire.

I was given the pleasure of opening the conference with a presentation on the work I have been undertaking on automatic 3D city modelling. This was followed by presentations on change detection, archive stereo imagery and forestry applications from various remote sensing satellites. Other presentations during the conference included the use of UAV and structure from motion, atmospheric correction of remote sensing data and the fusion of imagery and lidar.

During the three days keynote speakers included Dr Alastair Graham of Geoger Ltd, Dr Matthew Blackett from Coventry University and Professor James Brasington from Queen Mary University, who all gave invaluable advise of skills and abilities needed to progress during these early steps of research. A consistent theme mentioned by all was the need to be able to write software via different programming languages. A good historical overview was given by all of how data capture, storage and processing has changed.  This was also the first year that a sponsor session was held allowing sponsors to present what their respective companies do and how our work fits into these remits. Simon Mears from Leica Geosystems presented some of their recent hardware, particular the Aibotix UAV which was on display, and software developments. Dr Andy Wells from Sterling Geo gave a good overview of the developments of the ERDAS Imagine software and linked this to the topics that had already been presented that day.

The always popular poster session  saw a wide range of topics being presented from mass grave detection to how soil moisture content change can be detected. The sessions was almost dominated by Newcastle University with posters presented by first year PhD students Polpreecha Chidburee, Maria Peppa, Magdalena Smigaj, Elias Berra, who presented work on how they intend to undertaken their individual research projects, and Mitko Delev, who presented work undertaken as part of his masters project on using photogrammetry for structural gauging in a railway environment. A poster was also presented by undergraduate student Cedric Meyer who presented his dissertation work on the potential for bio-physical information retrieval.

As well as having a strong scientific program , several social activities were also offered including high pole activities, a trip to Worcester and a guided walk around the hills of Great Malvern. Luckily the sun shone all week, which made the walk much more enjoyable. An evening activity of laser quest was well attended with individuals battling it out to become the ultimate champion. With many references being made about laser scanning and how a scanner could be set up in the arena to make it even harder, it is fair to say I will never look at laser quest in the same way. Drinks were enjoyed at the end of both days allowing delegates to discuss their research work further as well as taking the opportunity to talk to the sponsors and keynote speakers.

A huge congratulation goes to Amy Woodget of Worcester University for organising such a successful conference. As I am about to take over as RSPSoc Wavelength Representative and start to organise next year’s conference here in Newcastle, I hope to build on the success on this year’s conference as well as show everybody what a vibrant city Newcastle is and what it has to offer.

Andrew McClune

GISRUK 2014 – Céilidhs, kilts and k-means cluster analysis

From the 16th April to 18th April I attended GISRUK in a surprisingly sunny Glasgow. The started with a welcome from Jane Drummond followed by an interesting key-note talk from Mike Worboys , A Theoretician’s eye view of GIS Research. He talked about how GISRUK has developed there has been  a dramatic fall in the proportion of papers that covered the theoretical side of GIS, with the focus now being on Application.

Talks from the first day that I particularly enjoyed focused on Spacebook, a system of delivering directions via audio as users encountered various way points on a route. William Mackaness talked about his research in comparing directions given using street names and direction given using landmarks.

Phil Bartie, who was a researcher on William Mackness’s paper delved deeper into the issue of Landmarks. Using images he looked at what people identified as landmarks and then analysed them semantically and spatially to distinguish related and unrelated features.

The following day saw me presenting a talk on some of the sensor infrastructure work we’ve done at Newcastle using HStore as a key-value based approach to storing heterogeneous data. Robin Lovelace’s talk round the merits of twitter data in research. Sparking some interesting debate about how research using twitter data uses data from the public so should benefit the public.

Thursday evening then featured the conference dinner followed by the Céilidh, an event that I was secretly dreading, dancer I am not. So was pleasantly surprised at how much fun the event was, as someone pointed out to me; it’s dancing but dancing with an algorithm.

Friday morning then featured my favorite talk of the conference with  Paul Brindley talking about his Phd work on extracting the additional address information from addresse listed on the internet to map out neighborhoods. A simple idea but with fascinating results.

The conference was then wrapped up with a keynote from Professor Alias Abdul Rahman who gave an interesting overview on the state of 3D GIS work.

The event was a fun filled thought provoking and thoroughly interesting. Thanks must  go to Jane Drummond for seamlessly organizing the event, even managing the weather. I would also like to thank William Mackness who brilliantly chaired my session.

Bring on Leeds 2015. Wonder what there version of Céilidh will be?

Neil – @neil_py_harris

AUM 2014

Alistair Ford has just returned from the fourth annual Applied Urban Modelling symposium (link) in Cambridge where cutting-edge research in spatial simulation of cities, including land-use transport interaction models, agent-based modelling, and big data analysis, was presented and discussed. The conference started four years ago as a reunion of the spatial interaction community of the 1970s to examine progress over the intervening decades, but has grown to include other types of dynamic urban simulation, visualisation, and data analytics.

Michael Wegener (formerly Professor of Spatial Planning at the University of Dortmund) gave a fascinating opening address looking at predictions made by models and modellers 20 years ago and how accurate they had been, This included a discussion of Aldous Huxley’s 1931 book ‘Brave New World’ and whether current advances in data-gathering technologies are taking us in the direction of the future described in that novel! Other presentations on the first day included an attempt to map Lima’s slums using UAVs (ReMap Lima), modelling of all 654 Chinese cities using a parcel-based vector cellular automata model, and a new analysis of Singapore using community detection from transport network flows using analysis of smartcard data (link).  Light relief was provided by a presentation of the Imaginary Lines project, a cross between an art project and an infrastructure model!  To end the first day Paul Waddell from Berkley presented the latest developments from the UrbanSim stable including GeoCanvas, (now available to download for Beta testing) which allows fast 3D visualisation of large urban datasets, and the developments of  UrbanSim to include an IPython interface and PostGIS support.

Mike Batty from CASA at UCL started the second day with a review of progress on urban modelling and the big issues facing the community today (including a loss of faith in predictive ability, loss of parsimony, the need for money and information flows as well as people and goods flows, inclusion of data about transport trips for non-work purposes (which are only ~25% of journeys in cities now), the challenge of growing city regions and globalisation, and the rapid change in cities today). Paul Buchanan from Volterra gave a critique of transport economics, showing how wrong a lot of assumptions (i.e. Value of Time measures) are, before Coen Tuellings from Cambridge University presented his model of land economics and transport in The Netherlands. Pascal Perez from SMART in Australia showed his work on TransMob, an agent-based model of urban travel and residences. The day finished with a fascinating session on the redevelopment of the King’s Cross area of London, giving a real insight into the planning and development process and showing us all just how difficult it is to model the ways that decisions are made in cities!

The final day included sessions on standards and benchmarking (including ISO standards for urban data) and urban dynamics (with some network analysis of city street networks and their evolution). The day, and conference, concluded with a 2-hour round-table discussion about emerging issues, where it was agreed that urban modelling needs to focus on new applications, particularly the challenges posed by climate change  and the need for sustainability. Challenges that we in the School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences are well-placed to meet!

 

Urban Integration 2014

Researchers from the Geospatial Engineering group (Alistair Ford, Daniel Caparos-Midwood, Shaun Brown) recently attended the Urban Integration conference in Sheffield which marked the end of the EU Cost Action on Integrated Assessment of Climate Change (link). This cost action was led by Prof Richard Dawson, also of the School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, and aimed at bringing together practicioners from across Europe who are looking at the problems facing cities in an integrated way.

A number of topics were addressed across a broad range of fields, but papers of particular interest to geospatial engineers included Jonathan Kohler (Fraunhofer Institute) on why we need urban models and what characteristics they possess (e.g. simplifying reality, explicitly stating theories and assumptions, simulating future scenarios), Christoph Reinhart from the MIT Sustainable Design Lab on the combination of Building Performance Simulation with other urban models in the Urban Modelling Interface (urbanmodeling.net) and Reinhard Koning from ETH Zurich (check!) who presented his simulation integration platform which allows the combination of model outputs to form an urban planning support system using big data to understand the urban system and find high suitability areas for sustainable development.

Jonathan Kohler at UI.
Jonathan Kohler at UI.

Other interesting research projects included the iGuess project (link) from the Henri Tudor Institute in Luxembourg, presented by Ulrich Leopold, which is an open-source platform in a database-driven web-based modular framework for performing urban simulations and Vincent Viguie from CIRED in Paris who showed his model of urban growth, NEDUM, linked to the Town Energy Balance (TEB) urban climate model (link) to assess heatwaves and associated health effects (and that even demolishing 10% of Paris’ buildings to create parks will have little effect on urban temperatures!

The conference was a great success and a fitting end to the COST Action.

EuroSDR EduServ E-Learning 2014

Monday 3rd till Tuesday 4th March saw the introductory lectures held for the 12th EuroSDR EduServ e-learning course at the University of Trento, Italy. Located just south of the Alps, the city sits in the Adige Valley so is surrounded by snow-caped mountains to give a picturesque view. The lectures were attended by a small delegation, mainly from national mapping agencies and universities from across mainland Europe. The four courses of the EduServ programme were introduced and presented by the various course leaders over the two days.

Trento University

View from Bruno Kessler Foundation, Trento University

On the first day Professor Norbert Haala, of Stuttgart University, started proceedings and presented material for his course on high density imaging matching. He presented some of the results of DSM creation from different software packages as part of his EuroSDR benchmark on image matching, whilst giving an overview of the Semi-Global Matching (SGM) algorithm, which I am using as part of my PhD, It was shown how a dense point cloud can be created from UAV and aerial photography by using the SGM approach. Hopefully this workshop will give greater insight and help overcome issues that have been experienced with ‘noisy’ photogrammetric point cloud.

Afterwards Dr Petri Ronnholm, of Aalto University in Finland, presented his course on the integrated use of airborne laser scanning and aerial photogrammetry. This was again based around a EuroSDR benchmark which tested different methods for the integration of the two dataset, some of which will be used in the course. The lecture was concluded with an interactive session to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of integrating the two dataset and what future applications this could be used for. One point that arose and was discussed was whether there was a need to integrate the two datasets due to high density point clouds being created from imagery, by the principles outline previously by Professor Haala. It was concluded that although lidar is still essential for forestry application, research may prove that photogrammetric point clouds are just as suitable as lidar for other applications.

A meal was held after the first day’s lectures at a local restaurant in Trento, with exquisite pasta and other traditional Italian food enjoyed over four courses and wash down with a glass (or two) of local wine. This offered a great ice breaker and a way to get to know other delegates as well as the course leaders.

Dr Clement Mallet, of IGN France, started the second day by presenting material for his course on change detection in high-resolution land-use/land-cover geodatabases and presented work from his EuroSDR benchmark regarding change detection methods. The need for land cover and land use was introduced followed by many different approaches presented, which mainly used satellite imagery.

Dr Daniella Poli, of Terra Messflug GmbH, closed proceedings with the last of the four courses on mapping using high-resolution satellite imagery. An insightful overview was given of low resolution film-based satellites to new high resolution digital-based sensors as well as the processing that is required for processing the data. This carried on from some of the principles covered by Dr Mallet, giving more details on the processing that may be required in order to use satellite imagery including radiometric corrections and Rational Polynomial Coefficients.

Thanks to Fabio Remondino of Trento University for hosting an excellent introductory workshop. With the first course starting today (10th March) and the final course finishing on the on the 13th June it is hope many new skills will be learnt over the next four months.

 

Andrew McClune

PhD Student in Photogrammetry

New PhD students join Geospatial Engineering

This September saw 5 new PhD students join the Geospatial Engineering group, working in the field of remote sensing and photogrammetry. Magdalena Smigaj is a NERC-funded student working with Forest Research and examining ways to improve early detection of tree health problems, with a focus on detection of disease in UK forests using airborne imagery, LiDAR and data from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Originally from Poland, Magdalena obtained a BSc in Surveying and Mapping Science from Newcastle University before commencing her PhD. Maria Peppa is jointly funded by the British Geological Survey and EPSRC, and is investigating the potential of UAVs for landslide monitoring, with focus on photogrammetric aspects. Originally a native of Athens, Greece, Maria recently completed a two year MSc in Geodesy and Geoinformatics at The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, so has traded one chilly climate for another in her move to Newcastle. Elias Berra has come to Newcastle following a Masters in Remote Sensing at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sol (UFRGS) in Brazil. Elias is funded by the Science Without Borders programme and will be developing methods for monitoring woodland phenology (seasonal changes) using the School’s UAV. Elias, Maria and Magda will be working together over the coming weeks and months to develop more practical skills related to piloting and planning UAV flights. Polpreecha Chidburee, who goes by the nickname of Aun, is a Thai-sponsored PhD student who will be developing a close range photogrammetric system for rapid assessment of slope instability hazard. Aun is expected to work closely with Maria and a number of other CEG PhDs focusing on slope failure challenges. Finally, Afrah Daham is the latest in a line of PhD students to join the group from Iraq. Afrah, who is sponsored by the Iraqi government, joined the group from the University of Baghdad, where she was a lecturer in photogrammetry. Afrah will be researching the field of feature extraction and building reconstruction from mobile laser scanning data, exploiting a unique mobile mapping dataset acquired for the Newcastle University campus over the summer of 2013.

From left to right: Maria Peppa, Afrah Daham, Magdalena Smigaj, Elias Berra and Polpreecha Chidburee

A summer of SALCA

 

Geospatial Engineering researchers recently took a trip ‘Down Under’ to participate in a unique terrestrial laser scanning inter-comparison exercise. Dr Rachel Gaulton and Dr Steve Hancock joined almost 30 leading researchers from the UK, Australia and the U.S. at field sites near Brisbane in early August to evaluate and compare how five different laser scanners and a range of other measurement approaches can help to measure and monitor forest canopy structure. These scanners included the Salford Advanced Laser Canopy Analyser (or SALCA) , the subject of on-going NERC-funded research at Newcastle, in collaboration with University of Salford and UCL, examining the potential of dual-wavelength laser scanning for assessing forest canopy health.

The exercise, organised by John Armston and colleagues at DSITIA Queensland and CSIRO, was an activity of the Terrestrial Laser Scanning International Interest Group (TLSIIG), a recently formed network of scientists with an interest in forest laser scanning. Alongside SALCA, measurements of three field plots were made with the World’s only other dual-wavelength TLS, DWEL (developed by Prof. Alan Strahler at Boston University with collaborators at CSIRO, UMass Boston and UMass Lowell), the low-cost Canopy Biomass Lidars (named Candi and Bruno and developed by UMass Boston and RIT) and two commercial systems. Photogrammetric techniques also played a part with co-incident measurements made with the AusPlots ‘Photopoint’ method, a system designed to obtain 3D forest structure information from photo panoramas. A report on the exercise featured on Australian TV News .

SALCA 1
Intercomparison exercise participants and their scanners. From left to right: A Riegl VZ400, a CBL, DWEL, a Faro scanner and SALCA.

Alongside the high-tech methods, leaf samples from the tree canopies were needed to allow measurement of spectral properties and to test the ability of dual-wavelength data to distinguish leaves and bark – a key factor in producing accurate estimates of canopy structure. Steve joined the destructive sampling team in using a ‘line thrower’ (or big slingshot) to collect the samples and undertook additional sampling to estimate the true leaf area index of a section of heavily laser scanned tree canopy.  Work is now on-going to calibrate and compare the data sets, with early results presented by TLSIIG members (John Armston, Crystal Schaaf and Alan Strahler) at the Silvilaser 2013 conference in Beijing.

Ian Paynter (UMass) and Steve with canopy samples and the line thrower (left) and a subset of SALCA data from Brisbane Forest Park (right).

The work in Brisbane followed a month-long field experiment with the SALCA instrument at the University’s Cockle Park Farm.  The experiment, part of a NERC-funded research project examining the potential of dual-wavelength laser scanning in forest health monitoring, was focussed on testing the sensitivity of the instrument to changes in canopy water content – an indicator of drought or disease. The canopy-scale experiment at Cockle Park involved subjecting 22 trees to drought stress, whilst making extensive physiological, spectral and laser scanner measurements and preliminary results have recently been presented by Rachel at the RSPSoc 2013 Annual Conference in Glasgow and the 9th EARSeL Forest Fire Special Interest Group Workshop held in Warwickshire.

More information about the SALCA instrument and on-going research can be found in the SALCA Diaries.

Scanning small-leaved lime at Cockle Park farm and SALCA data from a group of trees suffering drought stress (colours indicate reflectance at 1545 nm).

Many thanks are due to John Armston and colleagues for their hard work organising the Brisbane field work. Steve Hancock’s travel to the inter-comparison exercise was funded by a small grant from the Douglas Bomford Trust.

Football Tweets Part 2 – Local tweeter or Glory tweeter

A while ago here at Newcastle we set up a system to record the locations of football fans on twitter. Whilst this system was mainly a bit of fun and also a great means of testing our infrastructure it also very rapidly provided us with a considerable amount of data. And with an upcoming talk about our football tweet work I was given the opportunity to again carry out some analysis on this data.

Last time round when I analysed the football data I used about a month’s worth of data to look at football team fan locality. However this selection of data wasn’t particularly fair as it contained a number of different fixtures with teams playing both home and away which would have heavily affected the distance from tweet to club. For instance if Newcastle were playing away at Fulham it’s not fair to measure the distance from “#NUFC” tweets to St James Park “ooh look Newcastle have loads of fans in London, they’re not local supporter are they”. So this time round I looked at just tweets taking place in the UK during the recent international break during which there were no Premier league games. The map below shows this data subset.

Firstly I carried out the same analysis as last time whereby I measured the distance from tweet to the ground of the club it was about.  These distances were then averaged per club to give an average tweet distance for each club. The result are below (click to enlarge). The club with the shortest distance was West Brom with a very impressive average distance  of 5.7km. However we only actually recorded 10 tweets during this period, so in short not many people tweet about West Brom but the ones that do are very close to The Hawthorns. At the other end of the spectrum you have your expected “glory” clubs. Your Liverpools, your Man Us and your Norwich Citys…

…hang on Norwich City?? I myself am a Norwich City fan so found this stat at little hard to believe, you’d be hard pressed to call me a glory supporter. I tried to think about why Norwich may have scored so highly here. My conclusion was that as Norwich is the only football league team in Norfolk it represents a larger area than most clubs. Therefore this large distance could maybe be justified.

So my next piece of analysis was to look at whether the tweet about a club fell in the same county as that club. Again my results are shown below. Yet again West Brom performed the best with 100% of its tweets falling in the west midlands. And Norwich city had disappeared from the bottom 3 into mid table (something I wish we’d do in the premiership). But now the worst performer was Hull City.  Had their rebrand to Hull City Tigers really caused them to have a wider fan base? Probably not, this is probably caused by Kingston upon Hull being considerably smaller in comparison to a lot of other football team counties. And you could very easily be from outside Kingston upon Hull with Hull city still being your nearest (premier league) club.

Therefore I thought I’d carry out another piece of analysis this time looking at whether or not the tweet was about their nearest club.  Once again my results are displayed below.  Here Hull have leapt from bottom to 2nd and Southampton have also made a considerable leap up the table.  However again I noted something from the results which was that this time the bottom 5 is made up of clubs with another in very close proximity so the tweet may still be about a “nearby” club but not be counted as there is a club closer.

To account for this I needed some meaningful distance which would be considered as local. After a quick search I found that CAMRA consider any ale produced in a 20 mile radius of the pub to be local, could this be applied to football fan? Therefore I conducted one last test using this CAMRA metric of “localness” which counted the number of tweets which had no closer club OR were with 20 miles of the club.  And for a final time my results are shown below.

Hopefully this shows some interesting results produced by just a few simple POSTGIS queries.

Neil – @neil_py_harris

Strewth, these guys are SMART!

The inaugural International Symposium for Next Generation Infrastructure was held between 1st and 4th October 2013, at the SMART Infrastructure Research Facility at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and one lucky Geospatial Engineering researcher from Newcastle was able to attend. David Alderson gave a 20 minute presentation entitled “A National-Scale Infrastructure Database and Modelling Environment for the UK” following a successful submission of a conference paper to the conference committee, under the same title. The work contained within the paper and the presentation represented an amalgamation of work conducted by David and other researchers from the Geospatial Engineering group at Newcastle and other research institutes and universities involved in the Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium (UK ITRC) programme. The focus of the paper and presentation was to give readers and delegates alike a glimpse of some of the work undertaken in the process of constructing a database of infrastructure-related data relevant to the UK. This included not only an overview of some of the datasets that may be found within the database, but also a preview of some of the visualisation tools that are being developed on top of the data. An overview of these visualisation tools can be found within other posts in this blog site here.

A copy of the slides can also be found here and here. Unfortunately the presentation has had to be split into two parts, so please download from both links to get the full presentation.

Other representatives from the School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences at Newcastle University, UK could also be found delivering presentations at the event including:

Miss Sarah Dunn, PhD Student – Modelling infrastructure systems for resilience and sustainability (part one, part two)

Mr Shaun Brown, PhD Student – Resilience of resource movements to disruptive events

Mr Matthew Holmes, STREAM PhD Student – How do we ensure the assessment of infrastructure resilience is proportionate to the risk?

Further to this fantastic opportunity, a further round of meetings looking to develop collaborations between researchers at SMART, including former Newcastle-based PhD student and post-doctoral researcher Dr Tomas Holderness, and the Geospatial Engineering group at Newcastle, is being held at the SMART infrastructure facility between October 8th and 11th 2013. These meetings will look to focus on potential collaborative opportunities regarding network interdependencies between infrastructure networks, and also web-based data dashboards for visualisation and dissemination purposes.

Watch this space for more information…