SBIR-STTR Award

Tri-Space, Inc. and its partner, Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp (BATC) propose to design, develop, and test a prototype a system to automatically fuse and register remotely sensed data that differ spectrally, spatially, and temporally, and may also be collected from differing viewing angles or from differing platforms. The proposed product, the Spectral Image Fusor (SPIF), will fuse hyperspectral data sampled over the spectral range from 0.4 to 2.5 um with a thermal data cube covering the spectral band from 8 to 14 um and with ground based point measurements, where available. The proposed research will focus on autonomous atmospheric correction and geometric correction of coastal remote sensing data into a single geo-referenced coordinate system. Atmospheric and geometric correction are challenging for coastal environments because the ocean's albedo is low in the visible spectrum resulting in reduced signal strength for accurate atmospheric correction and because temporally fixed ground control points are frequently not available for geometric correction. Our innovative approach to these challenges relies on the iterative spectral and spatial feature matching. The results will benefit a wide variety of commercial remote sensing applications with GIS requirements for coastal monitoring and coastal change.

Potential Commercial Applications:
The goal of the proposed research is to prototype and build a Spectral Image Fusor (SPIF) to enable rapid and autonomous mapping for disaster assessment, pollution monitoring, wetlands monitoring, trafficability analyses, and other analyses of coastal regions. The prospective users of SPIF might be experts in GIS applications, land use managers, wetlands biologists, or remote sensing applications specialists.