Geary Layne

Intelligent Electronic Navigational Aids: A New Approach

Intelligent devices, with smart clutter management capabilities, can enhance a users situational awareness under adverse conditions. Two approaches to assist a user with target detection and clutter analysis are presented, and suggestions on how these tools could be integrated with an electronic chart system are further detailed. The first tool, which can assist a user in finding a target partially obscured by display clutter, is a multiple-view generalization of AdaBoost. The second technique determines a meaningful measure of clutter in electronic displays by clustering features in both geospatial and color space. The clutter metric correlates with preliminary, subjective, clutter ratings. The user can be warned if display clutter is a potential hazard to performance. Synthetic and real data sets are used for performance evaluation of the proposed technique compared with recent classifier fusion strategies

Classifying sidescan sonar images using self organizing maps

Self organizing maps (SOMs) can be used for computer‐aided classification of objects found in two‐dimensional snippets of sidescan sonar images. SOMs are briefly discussed, including the choice of features or attributes as well as various types of input data. The inputs can be, for example, the data values themselves, either raw or processed images; the amplitudes of the Fourier transform coefficients of the data; the wavelet transform coefficients of the data; the energies of the horizontal, vertical, or diagonal wavelet coefficients; the autocorrelation of the data; the Hartley transform coefficients of the data; the cepstrum; the dimensions of the object; or the sonar bright spot and shadow character. Tabular results and two‐dimensional maps showing the groupings of measured and processed sidescan data are presented. Comparisons are made with human classifications of the same images. [Research supported in part by NRL‐ASEE Summer Faculty Research Program.]

New Trends in Intelligent Electronic Navigational Aids

The smart management of clutter is a key component in designing intelligent, next-generation user interfaces and electronic displays. Intelligent devices can enhance a users situational awareness under adverse conditions. In this paper we present two approaches to assist a user with target detection and clutter analysis, and we suggest how these tools could be integrated with an electronic chart system. The first tool, an information fusion technique, is a multiple-view generalization of AdaBoost, which can assist a user in finding a target partially obscured by display clutter. The second technique clusters geospatial features on an electronic display and determines a meaningful measure of display clutter. The clutter metric correlates with preliminary, subjective, clutter rankings. The metric can be used to warn a user if display clutter is a potential hazard for his performance. We compare the performance of the proposed techniques with recent classifier fusion strategies on a set of synthetic data.

Parallel software solutions for processing hydrographic data

The research in this paper focuses on the I/O problem associated with a parallel application writing to a single physical disk. Included in our research are the original ideas that led to the first version of the parallel software, subsequent versions of the software derived from lessons learned from benchmark results, and speedup results of each version. The underlying purpose of this software is to process hydrographic data having a complicated, multi-tiered format. The data processing involves reading tens to hundreds of files containing raw data, filtering out extraneous data values, and writing the filtered data to a single file used in additional processing. The problem is not computationally intensive, but bound by the systems file writing capability. Results show that the more responsible the software was for organizing the data before writing, the better the speedup. The critical factor for writing data efficiently involved the limitation of writing data over a single I/O controller. Our parallel software has fantastic utility where system specifications do not allow for the use of parallel file systems, or writing data over multiple I/O controllers.