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Item Toward polarization-enhanced water quality remote sensing measurements from UAVs(SPIE, 2024-05) Morgan, P. Flint; Weller, Wyatt W.; Maxwell, Dylan J.; Hamp, Shannon M.; Venkatesulu, Erica; Shaw, Joseph A.; Whitaker, Bradley M.; Roddewig, Michael R.Montana and similar regions contain numerous rivers and lakes that are too small to be spatially resolved by satellites that provide water quality estimates. Unoccupied Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can be used to obtain such data with much higher spatial and temporal resolution. Water properties are traditionally retrieved from passively measured spectral radiance, but polarization has been shown to improve retrievals of the attenuation-to-absorption ratio to enable calculation of the scattering coefficient for in-water particulate matter. This feeds into improved retrievals of other parameters such as the bulk refractive index and particle size distribution. This presentation will describe experiments conducted to develop a data set for water remote sensing using combined UAV-based hyperspectral and polarization cameras supplemented with in-situ sampling at Flathead Lake in northwestern Montana and the results of preliminary data analysis. A symbolic regression model was used to derive two equations: one relating DoLP, AoP, and the linear Stokes parameters at wavelengths of 440 nm, 550 nm and 660 nm, to chlorophyll-a content, and one relating the same data to the attenuation-to-absorption ratio for 440 nm, 550 nm and 660 nm. Symbolic regression is a machine learning algorithm where the inputs are vectors and the output is an analytic expression, typically chosen by a genetic algorithm. An advantage of this approach is that the explainability of a simple equation can be combined with the accuracy of less explainable models, such as the genetic algorithm.Item Benthic river algae mapping using hyperspectral imagery from unoccupied aerial vehicles(SPIE-Intl Soc Optical Eng, 2024-06) Logan, Riley D.; Shaw, Joseph A.The increasing prevalence of nuisance benthic algal blooms in freshwater systems has led to water quality monitoring programs based on the presence and abundance of algae. Large blooms of the nuisance filamentous algae, Cladophora glomerata, have become common in the waters of the Upper Clark Fork River in western Montana. To aid in the understanding of algal growth dynamics, unoccupied aerial vehicle (UAV)-based hyperspectral images were gathered at three field sites along the length of the river throughout the growing season of 2021. Select regions within images covering the spectral range of 400 to 850 nm were labeled based on a combination of professional judgment and spectral profiles and used to train a random forest classifier to identify benthic algal growth across several classes, including benthic growth dominated by Cladophora (Clado), benthic growth dominated by growth forms other than Cladophora (non-Clado), and areas below a visually detectable threshold of benthic growth (bare substrate). After classification, images were stitched together to produce spatial distribution maps of each river reach while also calculating the average percent cover for each reach, achieving an accuracy of approximately 99% relative to manually labeled images. Results of this analysis showed strong variability across each reach, both temporally (up to 40%) and spatially (up to 46%), indicating that UAV-based imaging with high-spatial resolution could augment and therefore improve traditional measurement techniques that are spatially limited, such as spot sampling.Item Comparison of Supervised Learning and Changepoint Detection for Insect Detection in Lidar Data(MDPI AG, 2023-12) Vannoy, Trevor C.; Sweeney, Nathaniel B.; Shaw, Joseph A.; Whitaker, Bradley M.Concerns about decreases in insect population and biodiversity, in addition to the need for monitoring insects in agriculture and disease control, have led to an increased need for automated, non-invasive monitoring techniques. To this end, entomological lidar systems have been developed and successfully used for detecting and classifying insects. However, the data produced by these lidar systems create several problems from a data analysis standpoint: the data can contain millions of observations, very few observations contain insects, and the background environment is non-stationary. This study compares the insect-detection performance of various supervised machine learning and unsupervised changepoint detection algorithms and provides commentary on the relative strengths of each method. We found that the supervised methods generally perform better than the changepoint detection methods, at the cost of needing labeled data. The supervised learning method with the highest Matthew’s Correlation Coefficient score on the testing set correctly identified 99.5% of the insect-containing images and 83.7% of the non-insect images; similarly, the best changepoint detection method correctly identified 83.2% of the insect-containing images and 84.2% of the non-insect images. Our results show that both types of methods can reduce the need for manual data analysis.Item Agile collaboration: Citizen science as a transdisciplinary approach to heliophysics(Frontiers Media SA, 2023-04) Ledvina, Vincent; Brandt, Laura; MacDonald, Elizabeth; Frissell, Nathaniel; Anderson, Justin; Chen, Thomas Y.; French, Ryan J.; Mare, Francesca Di; Grover, Andrea; Sigsbee, Kristine; Gallardo-Lacourt, Bea; Lach, Donna; Shaw, Joseph A.; Hunnekuhl, Michael; Kosar, Burcu; Barkhouse, Wayne; Young, Tim; Kedhambadi, Chandresh; Ozturk, Dogacan S.; Claudepierre, Seth G.; Dong, Chuanfei; Witteman, Andy; Kuzub, Jeremy; Sinha, GunjanCitizen science connects scientists with the public to enable discovery, engaging broad audiences across the world. There are many attributes that make citizen science an asset to the field of heliophysics, including agile collaboration. Agility is the extent to which a person, group of people, technology, or project can work efficiently, pivot, and adapt to adversity. Citizen scientists are agile; they are adaptable and responsive. Citizen science projects and their underlying technology platforms are also agile in the software development sense, by utilizing beta testing and short timeframes to pivot in response to community needs. As they capture scientifically valuable data, citizen scientists can bring expertise from other fields to scientific teams. The impact of citizen science projects and communities means citizen scientists are a bridge between scientists and the public, facilitating the exchange of information. These attributes of citizen scientists form the framework of agile collaboration. In this paper, we contextualize agile collaboration primarily for aurora chasers, a group of citizen scientists actively engaged in projects and independent data gathering. Nevertheless, these insights scale across other domains and projects. Citizen science is an emerging yet proven way of enhancing the current research landscape. To tackle the next-generation’s biggest research problems, agile collaboration with citizen scientists will become necessary.Item Gray Spectralon polarized reflectance deviations from Lambertian(SPIE, 2022-06) Field, Nathaniel J.; Brown, Jarrod P.; Card, Darrel B.; Welsh, Chad M.; Van Rynbach, Andre J.; Shaw, Joseph A.While Spectralon panels are largely assumed to be ideal Lambertian surfaces, their actual polarized reflective responses deviate from the ideal by at least a small amount at illumination and viewing angles off surface normal. The Mueller matrix response of four different panels between 10% and 99% reflectance were measured and the radiometric response from two distinct monostatic or nearmonostatic polarimeter systems are compared, one at Montana State University and one at the Air Force Research Lab. The deviations from an assumed ideal Lambertian surface are reported.Item Optical transmittance of 3D printing materials(Optica Publishing Group, 2021-07) Hamp, Shannon M.; Logan, Riley D.; Shaw, Joseph A.The increasing prevalence of three-dimensional (3D) printing of optical housings and mounts necessitates a better understanding of the optical properties of printing materials. This paper describes a method for using multithickness samples of 3D printing materials to measure transmittance spectra at wavelengths from 400 to 2400 nm [visible to short-wave infrared (IR)]. In this method, 3D samples with material thicknesses of 1, 2, 3, and 4 mm were positioned in front of a uniform light source with a spectrometer probe on the opposing side to measure the light transmittance. Transmission depended primarily on the thickness and color of the sample, and multiple scattering prevented the use of a simple exponential model to relate transmittance, extinction, and thickness. A Solidworks file and a 3D printer file are included with the paper to enable measurements of additional materials with the same method.Item Generalized Nighttime Radiative Deficits(Elsevier BV, 2021-10) Howell, John C.; Yizhaq, Tomer; Drechsler, Nadav; Zamir, Yuval; Beysens, Daniel; Shaw, Joseph A.We derive a general, tilt-dependent, nighttime, radiative deficit model with an eye towards improved dew collection. The model incorporates atmospheric/environmental incoming radiation, a linear precipitable water vapor transmittance function dependent on local meteo data and the influence of near-horizon obstacles. A brief discussion of cloud cover is given. The model is then used more specifically to predict radiative deficits for an ideal blackbody emitter in an environment with an isotropic temperature. Knowing the tilt angle, near-horizon obstacles and local meteo-data, it is then possible to estimate the radiative deficit of a given emitter. We consider errors resulting from the assumption that the ground and obstacles are at the same temperature as the air. We also analyze the errors arising from the linear precipitable water vapor transmittance function by comparing the results against high-resolution, full-spectrum Modtran® data [1]. We show that for typical tilt angles, the isotropic temperature model is a reasonable approximation as long as the above-horizon environmental heating is small. We believe these results will be broadly valuable for the field of radiative cooling where a general radiative treatment has yet to be made and in particular the field of dew water harvesting.Item Trutinor: A Conceptual Study for a Next-Generation Earth Radiant Energy Instrument(MDPI, 2020-10) Young, Cindy L.; Lukashin, Constantine; Taylor, Patrick C.; Swanson, Rand; Kirk, William S.; Cooney, Michael; Swartz, William H.; Goldberg, Arnold; Stone, Thomas; Jackson, Trevor; Doelling, David R.; Shaw, Joseph A.; Buleri, ChristineUninterrupted and overlapping satellite instrument measurements of Earth’s radiation budget from space are required to sufficiently monitor the planet’s changing climate, detect trends in key climate variables, constrain climate models, and quantify climate feedbacks. The Clouds and Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) instruments are currently making these vital measurements for the scientific community and society, but with modern technologies, there are more efficient and cost-effective alternatives to the CERES implementation. We present a compact radiometer concept, Trutinor (meaning “balance” in Latin), with two broadband channels, shortwave (0.2–3 μm) and longwave (5–50 μm), capable of continuing the CERES record by flying in formation with an existing imager on another satellite platform. The instrument uses a three-mirror off-axis anastigmat telescope as the front optics to image these broadband radiances onto a microbolometer array coated with gold black, providing the required performance across the full spectral range. Each pixel of the sensor has a field of view of 0.6°, which was chosen so the shortwave band can be efficiently calibrated using the Moon as an on-orbit light source with the same angular extent, thereby reducing mass and improving measurement accuracy, towards the goal of a gap-tolerant observing system. The longwave band will utilize compact blackbodies with phase-change cells for an absolute calibration reference, establishing a clear path for SI-traceability. Trutinor’s instrument breadboard has been designed and is currently being built and tested.Item Reduced-cost hyperspectral convolutional neural networks(2020-09) Morales, Giorgio; Sheppard, John W.; Scherrer, Bryan; Shaw, Joseph A.Hyperspectral imaging provides a useful tool for extracting complex information when visual spectral bands are not enough to solve certain tasks. However, processing hyperspectral images (HSIs) is usually computationally expensive due to the great amount of both spatial and spectral data they incorporate. We present a low-cost convolutional neural network designed for HSI classification. Its architecture consists of two parts: a series of densely connected three-dimensional (3-D) convolutions used as a feature extractor, and a series of two-dimensional (2-D) separable convolutions used as a spatial encoder. We show that this design involves fewer trainable parameters compared to other approaches, yet without detriment to its performance. What is more, we achieve comparable state-of-the-art results testing our architecture on four public remote sensing datasets: Indian Pines, Pavia University, Salinas, and EuroSAT; and a dataset of Kochia leaves [Bassia scoparia] with three different levels of herbicide resistance. The source code and datasets are available online.Item Hyperspectral Band Selection for Multispectral Image Classification with Convolutional Networks(2021) Morales, Giorgio; Sheppard, John W.; Logan, Riley D.; Shaw, Joseph A.In recent years, Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) has become a powerful source for reliable data in applications such as remote sensing, agriculture, and biomedicine. However, hyperspectral images are highly data-dense and often benefit from methods to reduce the number of spectral bands while retaining the most useful information for a specific application. We propose a novel band selection method to select a reduced set of wavelengths, obtained from an HSI system in the context of image classification. Our approach consists of two main steps: the first utilizes a filter-based approach to find relevant spectral bands based on a collinearity analysis between a band and its neighbors. This analysis helps to remove redundant bands and dramatically reduces the search space. The second step applies a wrapper-based approach to select bands from the reduced set based on their information entropy values, and trains a compact Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to evaluate the performance of the current selection. We present classification results obtained from our method and compare them to other feature selection methods on two hyperspectral image datasets. Additionally, we use the original hyperspectral data cube to simulate the process of using actual filters in a multispectral imager. We show that our method produces more suitable results for a multispectral sensor design.