Ploughing Championships 2016

I spent most of yesterday afternoon at the Ploughing Championships, peddling my wares at the Chartered Surveyors stand. iCrag had been there the day before, Maynooth University are there all three days and I was the Geomatics representative on the afternoon slot, showcasing some RPAS and satellite applications that could be of use to the rural community. What an event - over 200,000 people in two days and it is almost like a small city.

Here it is (image centre, very bright pixels) doing its best to outshine Tullamore (NE corner of image) on yesterdays Sentinel 1a image. It's Ireland's biggest outdoor event, i understand....

RPAS Consumer Guide

A series of guidelines have just been published by the SCSI working group on RPAS that I am a member of. Consumer guides are designed to inform consumers who might be considering commissioning a RPAS survey for their site of the pros and cons of the method, who they should rely on, what to ask for, etc. RPAS Operations is a highly dynamic regulatory environment and things are already changing since we first began drafting them that will impact significantly.

Still - a good place to start.

Land Journal Article Published

An edited version of the article we wrote for the SCSI  Surveyor's Journal has been picked up and published in the latest edition of the Land Journal, RICS.

Image Registration

Some great data coming in from the different sensor pod surveys. Below is an example of two different images (multispectral and RGB) co-registered using the on-board GPS. We have no IMU on board yet, so this is two different images with two different image capture frequencies and trying to back interpolate off the GPS track so there are obviously going to be errors. The third image (thermal) was registered using matching features in the other images. The thermal camera can provide very low contrast at times, hence the overlap problems to the south with the field boundaries. The fourth image is a hyperspectral FCC for the same area - 100 bands, 600-1000nm.

S2a and Change Detection

Three things came to mind when I saw this article and image.

1) Surprise : A really powerful demonstration of applications of RS, watch progress of the bridge.
2) Impressed : What beautiful colours, and such high res imagery for free!
3) Jealous: Wait a minute.....how many cloud free images have they?? One a month at least..... To the best of my knowledge there is only one good cloud free image of Ireland (June 2016) in the S2a database.

New Paper Published

A new paper with Margaret McCaul as lead author has been published in Sensors. This includes some of the work we did with an early version of the sensor pod over Kinvarra bay.

Mid space debris

With Sentinel 1a playing such a key role in the slick feature mapping project - i have to admit a moment of panic when i saw "COPERNICUS Sentinel-1a satellite hit by space particle" in my twitter feed. It seems a particle no larger than a mm hit the solar panels on the platform. Thankfully, ESA say no major negative influence except momentary orbit problems and a slight power drain. More info here.

Sentinel 1b is up already so there is redundancy but still...

Monitoring the Oceans from Space

A free massive online course is starting late October on RS for the Marine which looks really well designed and presented. A long way from some of the courses that I have done with intermittent screen sharing and cries for help in the chat box.

Details and info on how to register here.