DASL's focus continues to be on applications related to environmental modeling and natural resource management. For several years DASL staff has been working with application scientists in other disciplines on the development of specialized algorithms for the classification and analysis of very large scale imagery. The major focus of WSAL work has been the classification of land cover, habitat, and other ecosystem parameters for large regions and at a variety of scales. DASL staff have been working with WSAL application experts to develop efficient, rule-based algorithms that maintain the integrity of the data as the resolution is dropped to the coarser levels necessary to describe very large regions.
Ground truthing of the resulting imagery is currently underway.
Results of ground truthing will be used to fine-tune current algorithms, and to develop the next round of algorithms that adjust the data to even coarser scale. The focus of this work is the analysis of very large scale imagery from thin sections of oil well cores. The purpose is automated estimation of key parameters in oil well production, namely porosity and permeability. Steve has formed a company company to make his initial version of this software available , but much research remains to be done on the development of theory and practical algorithms in this area. Examples of this work is available on request.