In both GIS and terrain analysis, drainage systems are important components. Owing to local topography and subsurface geology, a drainage system achieves a particular drainage pattern based on the form and texture of its network of stream channels and tributaries. Although research has been done on the description of drainage patterns in geography and hydrology, automatic drainage pattern recog...

Fully polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (polSAR) data analysis has wide applications for terrain and ground cover classification. SAR technology, due to its high spatial resolution and soil penetration capability, is a good choice to identify problematic areas on earthen levees. In this paper, using the entropy (H), alpha angle ( ), and eigenvalue parameters (λ), we implemented several unsu...

Mars probes send back to Earth enormous amount of data. Automating the analysis of this data and its interpretation represents a challenging test of significant benefit to the domain of planetary science. In this study, we propose combining terrain segmentation and classification to interpret Martian topography data and to identify constituent landforms of the Martian landscape. Our approach us...

Autonomous navigation in natural environment requires three-dimensional (3-D) scene representation and interpretation. High density laser-based sensing is commonly used to capture the geometry of the scene, producing large amount of 3-D points with variable spatial density. We proposed a terrain classification method using such data. The approach relies on the computation of local features in 3...

Hyperspectral images face the problem of high dimensionality and low samples number, which results in unsatisfied recognition efficiency, thus dimensionality reduction is needed before terrain classification. A novel hyperspectral images feature extraction method is presented for dimensionality reduction. Firstly, take discrete Fourier transformation (DFT) of each pixel spectral curve, and comb...

Abstmct We present results from a tarain mapping system for walking robots that constructs quantitative models of surface gwmetry. The accuracy of the constructed maps enables safe, powercfficient locomotion over the natural, rugged terrain found on planetary surfaces. The mapping system acquires range images with a laser rangefinder, preprocesses and stores the images, and constructs elevation...

The system under investigation is the hydraulically driven large-scale combined legged and wheeled vehicle ALDURO. It combines the advantages of a walking machine with the stability and speed of a wheeled vehicle and is able to move over rugged terrain. Due to the kinematic constraints arising at the wheel-ground contact, ALDURO is a nonholonomic system which also includes several closed kinema...

For road vehicles, knowledge of terrain types is useful in improving passenger safety and comfort. The conventional methods are susceptible to vehicle speed variations and in this paper we present a method of using Laser Measurement System (LMS) data for speed independent road type classification. Experiments were carried out with an instrumented road vehicle (CRUISE), by manually driving on a ...

In GIS and in terrain analysis, drainage systems are important components. Due to local topography and subsurface geology, a drainage system achieves a particular drainage pattern based on the form and texture of its network of stream channels and tributaries. Drainage pattern recognition helps to provide a qualitative description of the terrain for analysis and classification and is useful for...

The major conclusions reached in this research effort are: 1) Landsat derived land cover classification data are, at present, a marginally accurate data source for county-level resource management requirements; and 2) the accuracy of standard product National Cartographic Information Center (NCIC) Digital Terrain Tape data appear to be questionable, again with respect to the information require...