Performance and Progress Report - John Doe FIX: put in the authors ...

Rhode Island). Initial results were impressive enough to request that we now extract all
the imagery from the tapes in DVCAM format and attempt to create a single large mosaic
for the “Monitor” site. Our mosaicking work has also supported cooperative research
with NMFS and other habitat mapping efforts including those of Bob McConneughey -
NOAA Pacific Fisheries. Their groups are now routinely creating mosaics from the
seafloor imagery using our video mosaicking software. Other habitat-related projects we
have worked on include those with Steve Intelmann, habitat mapping specialist, NOAA,
Olympic Coast Sanctuary, WA, and Scott Ferguson and John Rooney (NOAA Pacific
Fisheries, Hawaii) where mosaics were created from laser line scan data collected during
their western Pacific cruise in October 2006.
Research also continues in the stereo reconstruction for seafloor roughness estimation:
establishing the dependencies between the scene characteristics and highest spatial
frequency that can be resolved by the stereopsis technique (with graduate student Anton
Mamaenko) and the investigation of optimal blending algorithms for mosaic creation –
feathering, graph-cut, quilting, gradient domain stitching (with graduate student Fan Gu).
Fan Gu is also investigating quantitative approaches to estimating mosaic quality either
by matching the trend of individual frames to the trend of the corresponding frames backprojected
from the median mosaic or by extracting a set of matching features from
overlapping individual frames and warping the frames to force the collocation of the
features. The results of these efforts will be reported in the theses of Gu and Mamaenko.
DATA MANAGEMENT:
With the arrival of Jim Case as our full-time data manager, we have begun a serious
effort at organizing our data holdings and making them accessible both to internal and
external users. Since his arrival Jim has evaluated the hardware and software data
infrastructure at the Center. A data management scheme has been designed and in
support of this restructure, two new data servers have been purchased. In concert with
the data management restructuring, Case and Calder are working on a “Knowledge
Repository” database concept that will attempt to capture “expert opinion” form Center
domain experts on relevant information in any particular field.
The primary focus of this effort has been developing code and procedures to support the
mass migration of data from various locally-attached storage servers to a new Storage
Attached Network (SAN – see facilities discussion). The key features of the system are
automatic discovery and cataloging of data files by project, the harvesting of metadata
whenever possible from well-known data files and the storage of all of the above in a data
management schema within Oracle. All new code written for this project is either in C,
C++ or C#. C# is being used as the wrapper for all legacy code and the language for all
new code related to data management, metadata or Oracle I/O.
A pilot project focused on the Portsmouth harbor region was initiated in July. A major
component of the project was the development of a Center portal by which all data would
be discovered by the users. The technology chosen was Oracle Portal because it is tightly
integrated with the data and metadata catalogs and has embedded Web Mapping
JHC Performance Report 44 30 January 2007