PE&RS January 2005

Cover Image

The cover image of Mount St. Helens is a bare-Earth lidar digital elevation model, acquired September 20 – 22, 2003. Four quarter quad tiles of bare-Earth lidar TINs, which comprised the edifice of Mount St. Helens, were converted to 3-meter resolution lattices’ with ESRI ArcInfo. These the four separate lattice tiles were merged to create one continuous floating point grid. A color ramp was designed to accentuate the edifice topography and applied to the floating point grid with a black and white hillshade grid applied on top of the colorized grid at 40% transparency.

The lidar data was collected by Earth Data International, LLC in support of U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) High Priority Data Collection for the Department of the Interior. The lidar was flown at an altitude of 2438 meters (8000 feet) above mean terrain (AMT), with 3-meter postings, and an average swath width of 1537 meters. The lidar dataset of Mount St Helens is available to the public through The National Map http://nationalmap.usgs.gov/, and National Elevation Dataset http://seamless.usgs.gov/.

Vivian R. Queija, Geographer for the U.S. Geological Survey prepared the lidar image and design.

For more information on this image and data availability, please contact 1 -888-Ask-USGS (1888-285-8747) or email ask@usgs.gov.

Highlight Article

5 Recent U.S. Geological Survey Applications of Lidar (Adobe PDF 1.01Mb)
Vivian R. Queija, Jason M. Stoker, and John J. Kosovich

Correction to Highlight Article Figure 10. image (opens in new window - you may need to enable pop-ups in your browser to view this page)

Columns & Updates
10 Direct Georeferencing — The Development of a Real-time Wildfire Monitoring and Modeling System
15 Grids & Datums — Burkina Faso
17 ASPRS Membership Action Plan (Adobe PDF 76Kb)
19 Headquarters News — ASPRS Announces Certification of the First GIS/LIS Technologist, and ASPRS Commended on Lidar Guidelines (Adobe PDF 213Kb)
21 Industry News

Peer-Reviewed Articles (Click the linked titles to see the full abstract)

29 Mapping Spatial Thematic Accuracy with Fuzzy Sets
Liem T. Tran, James Wickham, S. Taylor Jarnagin, and C. Gregory Knight

A new method of mapping spatial accuracy of thematic land-cover maps using fuzzy sets is presented.

37 Configuring an Airborne Laser Scanner for Detecting Airport Obstructions
Christopher E. Parrish, Grady H. Tuell, William E. Carter, and Ramesh L. Shrestha

Modifications to airborne laser scanner data collection and system parameter configurations are shown, through both analytical and empirical methods, to enable improvement in the detection of airport obstructions.

47 A Four-Component Efficiency Index for Assessing Land Development Using Remote Sensing and GIS
Xia Li

This paper derives the indicators of quantity, quality, location, and morphology to access land development based on the integration of remote sensing and GIS.

59 The Performance of Fuzzy Operators on Fuzzy Classification of Urban Land Covers
Z. Islam and G. Metternicht

Evaluation of the performance of fuzzy operators for integrating fuzzy membership values associated with multiple spectral bands for mapping urban land covers.

69 Augmenting Grid-Based Contours to Improve Thin-Plate DEM Generation
Michael B. Gousie and Wm. Randolph Franklin

Gradient paths and intermediate contours improve thin plate DEM approximations from grid-based contour data.

81 Automated Quality Control for Orthoimages and DEMs
Joachim K. Höhle and Markéta Potucková

The checking of the geometric accuracy of orthoimages and digital elevation models is automatically carried out by means of area-based matching of corresponding orthoimage patches, and results of tests with innovative methods are presented.

89 Statistical Ratio Rank Ordered Differences Filter for SeaWiFS Impulse Noise Removal
Zhengjun Liu, Changyao Wang, Aixia Liu, and Xiangming Xiao

The SRROD Filter for SeaWiFS Impulse Noise Removal is described with a noise removal algorithm.

97 Photogrammetric Analysis of the Mars Global Surveyor Mapping Data
Jie Shan, Jong-suk Yoon, D. Scott Lee, Randolph L. Kirk, Gregory A. Neumann, and Charles H. Acton

Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) Profiles are registered with stereo Mars Orbiter Camera images at a nearly constant uncertainty of one MOLA ground spacing distance along the flight direction.

Announcements
9 Pecora 16 — Global Priorities in Land Remote Sensing
96 Call for Papers — The 20th Biennial Workshop on Aerial Photography, Videography, and High Resolution Digital Imagery for Resource Assessment
110 ASPRS 2005 Annual Conference — Geospatial Goes Global: From Your Neighborhood to the Whole Planet

Departments
18 New Member List
19 Region of the Month
24 Who’s Who in ASPRS
25 Sustaining Members
27 New Sustaining Member
28 Advertiser Index
58 Instructions to Authors
80 Forthcoming Articles
88 Calendar
109 Classifieds
111 Bookstore
116 Professional Directory
120 Membership Application