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International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XXXIX-B8, 2012
XXII ISPRS Congress, 25 August — 01 September 2012, Melbourne, Australia
3.2.2 Data quality assessment and improvement
Even if some data has been selected for inclusion in the
database, it is not always of the best possible quality. Within the
resources allocated to the KAL-Haiti project, we thus strive to
apply the state-of-the-art data processing methods in order to 1)
assess the data quality level 2) raise this quality level using the
best of our know-how, if necessary. This is required by the
researchers who, most often, are unwilling to bear the burden of
correcting data of poor quality. Some examples of this
processing are: denoising, radiometric calibration, reflectance
computation, geometric accuracy.
3.2.3 Data interoperability
In crisis management situations, information is produced with
different modalities (e.g. optical and SAR imagery) and in
different formats or reference systems. However none of these
information sources alone is sufficient to face the complexity of
the problems posed by the situation. As a consequence, fusion
of information coming from different sources is necessary,
provided that these data are interoperable. The KAL-Haiti
project takes this requirement into account by building data
whose properties are consistent throughout the whole dataset:
dating, geo-referencing, ortho-rectification, physical meaning,
consistent metadata, standard nomenclatures and formats, etc.
3.2.4 Data accessibility
One important point for efficient research as well as effective
support to humanitarian initiatives is the free accessibility to the
data. This is natural for data whose license grants to everybody
a free right to use them. But this is a concern for data which are
normally distributed within a commercial framework because
there exist no suitable generic license allowing non-commercial
uses in specific domains and for specific activities. Thus the
access to these commercial data in the KAL-Haiti database is
granted only to registered users on a per data basis, allowing the
traceability of their non-commercial uses.
3.3 The database
The datasets produced within the KAL-Haiti project are stored
into a database which is accessible through Internet (KAL-Haiti
website). The solution used so far for this implementation is
based on the KALIDEOS solution, and allows to query the
database using a small number of criteria (area of interest, data
type, sensor, etc.) and to retrieve the files containing the data.
In the second part of the project a solution built on more
cutting-edge technologies will be designed, allowing the users
to browse, combine, amend and enrich the datasets online.
3.4 Applications promotion and follow-up
Once they have been selected together with the community of
contributors, new applications are launched by mobilizing
either project or external resources. The goal is to propose, for
each problem which has been identified, the best possible
solution involving end-users with real needs in Haiti and the
highest-level scientific laboratories. Involvement of Haitian
teams or institutes is also considered in order to favour spin-off
on these topics.
The selected applications are then followed up as usual
scientific and technical developments, except that their outcome
(progress, produced data, publications, models, etc) are
systematically provided to the database.
19
4. EXAMPLES OF APPLICATIONS
In this section three applications which have been conducted
(first and second ones) or which could be realized (third one)
are briefly presented. They illustrate the diversity of the needs
and problems and also the richness of the database results. More
applications results will be available on the KAL-Haiti website
as soon as they become available and will be shown during the
oral presentation.
4.1 Reconstruction monitoring in urban areas
Construction and reconstruction of safe houses and buildings
after such a major disaster as the January,12 2010 earthquake is
one of the major challenges facing the Haitian nation and the
international community. Indeed a lot of initiatives have been
carried out: hard shelters have been installed in many locations,
destroyed buildings have been removed in most cities, houses
repairs have been made, and new buildings have been erected.
Monitoring this rapidly evolving situation is thus very
important from different perspectives: social services, economy
planning, health care, to name a few. In order to be effective,
such a monitoring should cover wide areas in order to account
for the whole population of the cities and should be updated at
short intervals for near real-time awareness. Remote sensing
imagery can thus be very useful for monitoring such evolutions
in this kind of situation.
In order to assess the added value of high resolution remote
sensing imageries for such situation monitoring, the KAL-Haiti
project has produced a set of vector layers built from satellite
and aerial imagery, and showing the buildings footprints at
different periods. Three layers showing the location and status
of 22 257 buildings over the Jacmel area (50 km?) have been
produced by photo-interpretation: one from a Worlview-l
image acquired on Dec. 9, 2009, before the earthquake, a
second one just after the earthquake from the NOAA aerial
campaign made on Jan. 24, 2010 and a third one 18 months
later using a Worldview-2 image acquired on July 17, 2011.
Figure 2 - Evolution of buildings and shelters in Jacmel area, at
3 dates: before, just after and 18 months after the earthquake.
