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At least 415 records · Page 23

Bouguer images of the North American craton and its structural evolution

Digital image processing techniques have been used to generate Bouguer images of the North American craton that diplay more of the granularity inherent in the data as compared with existing contour maps. A dominant NW-SE linear trend of highs and lows can be seen extending from South Dakota, through Nebraska, and into Missouri. The structural trend cuts across the major Precambrian boundary in Missouri, separating younger granites and rhyolites from older sheared granites and gneisses. This trend is probably related to features created during an early and perhaps initial episode of crustal assembly by collisional processes. The younger granitic materials are probably a thin cover over an older crust.

Arvidson, R. E.↗

Planar Rayleigh scattering and laser-induced fluorescence for visualization of a hot, Mach 2 annular air jet

Planar Rayleigh scattering (PRS) and planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) were used to investigate the vitiated air component of a coaxial hydrogen/vitiated air nonpremixed turbulent jet flame that is ejected at a Mach number of 2. All experiments were performed with a xenon chloride tunable excimer laser. Planar information for both techniques was obtained using laser sheets 6 cm high, 5 cm wide, and 300 micron thick. In this flow field, the effective Rayleigh cross section of the components in the vitiated air was assumed to be independent of composition. Therefore, the PRS technique produced signals which were proportional to total density. When the flow field was assumed to be at a known and uniform pressure, the PRS signal data for the vitiated air could be converted to temperature information. Also, PLIF images were generated by probing the OH molecule. These images contain striation patterns attributed to small localized instantaneous temperature nonuniformities. The results from the PLIF and PRS techniques were used to show that this flow field contains a nongaseous component, most likely liquid water that can be reduced by increasing the settling chamber wall temperature.

Balla, R. Jeffrey↗

Monitoring Land Surface Albedo and Vegetation Dynamics Using High Spatial and Temporal Resolution Synthetic Time Series from Landsat and the MODIS BRDF/NBAR/Albedo Product

Seasonal vegetation phenology can significantly alter surface albedo which in turn affects the global energy balance and the albedo warmingcooling feedbacks that impact climate change. To monitor and quantify the surface dynamics of heterogeneous landscapes, high temporal and spatial resolution synthetic time series of albedo and the enhanced vegetation index (EVI) were generated from the 500-meter Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) operational Collection V006 daily BRDF (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function) / NBAR (Nadir BRDF-Adjusted Reflectance) / albedo products and 30-meter Landsat 5 albedo and near-nadir reflectance data through the use of the Spatial and Temporal Adaptive Reflectance Fusion Model (STARFM). The traditional Landsat Albedo (Shuai et al., 2011) makes use of the MODIS BRDFAlbedo products (MCD43) by assigning appropriate BRDFs from coincident MODIS products to each Landsat image to generate a 30-meter Landsat albedo product for that acquisition date. The available cloud free Landsat 5 albedos (due to clouds, generated every 16 days at best) were used in conjunction with the daily MODIS albedos to determine the appropriate 30-meter albedos for the intervening daily time steps in this study. These enhanced daily 30-meter spatial resolution synthetic time series were then used to track albedo and vegetation phenology dynamics over three Ameriflux tower sites (Harvard Forest in 2007, Santa Rita in 2011 and Walker Branch in 2005). These Ameriflux sites were chosen as they are all quite nearby new towers coming on line for the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), and thus represent locations which will be served by spatially paired albedo measures in the near future. The availability of data from the NEON towers will greatly expand the sources of tower albedometer data available for evaluation of satellite products. At these three Ameriflux tower sites the synthetic time series of broadband shortwave albedos were evaluated using the tower albedo measurements with a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) less than 0.013 and a bias within the range of 0.006. These synthetic time series provide much greater spatial detail than the 500 meter gridded MODIS data, especially over more heterogeneous surfaces, which improves the efforts to characterize and monitor the spatial variation across species and communities. The mean of the difference between maximum and minimum synthetic time series of albedo within the MODIS pixels over a subset of satellite data of Harvard Forest (16 kilometers by 14 kilometers) was as high as 0.2 during the snow-covered period and reduced to around 0.1 during the snow-free period. Similarly, we have used STARFM to also couple MODIS Nadir BRDF-Adjusted Reflectances (NBAR) values with Landsat 5 reflectances to generate daily synthetic times series of NBAR and thus Enhanced Vegetation Index (NBAR-EVI) at a 30-meter resolution. While normally STARFM is used with directional reflectances, the use of the view angle corrected daily MODIS NBAR values will provide more consistent time series. These synthetic times series of EVI are shown to capture seasonal vegetation dynamics with finer spatial and temporal details, especially over heterogeneous land surfaces.

Vegetation Index↗

Fast and accurate simulations of calorimeter showers with normalizing flows

In this study, we introduce caloflow, a fast detector simulation framework based on normalizing flows. For the first time, we demonstrate that normalizing flows can reproduce many-channel calorimeter showers with extremely high fidelity, providing a fresh alternative to computationally expensive geant4 simulations, as well as other state-of-the-art fast simulation frameworks based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) or variational autoencoders (VAEs). In addition to the usual histograms of physical features and images of calorimeter showers, we introduce a new metric for judging the quality of generative modeling: the performance of a classifier trained to differentiate real from generated images. We show that GAN-generated images can be identified by the classifier with nearly 100% accuracy, while images generated from caloflow are better able to fool the classifier. More broadly, normalizing flows offer several advantages compared to other state-of-the-art approaches (GANs and VAEs), including tractable likelihoods, stable and convergent training, and principled model selection. Normalizing flows also provide a bijective mapping between data and the latent space, which could have other applications beyond simulation, for example, to detector unfolding.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

A Near IR Fabry-Perot Interferometer for Wide Field, Low Resolution Hyperspectral Imaging on the Next Generation Space Telescope

We discuss work in progress on a near-infrared tunable bandpass filter for the Goddard baseline wide field camera concept of the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM). This filter, the Demonstration Unit for Low Order Cryogenic Etalon (DULCE), is designed to demonstrate a high efficiency scanning Fabry-Perot etalon operating in interference orders 1 - 4 at 30K with a high stability DSP based servo control system. DULCE is currently the only available tunable filter for lower order cryogenic operation in the near infrared. In this application, scanning etalons will illuminate the focal plane arrays with a single order of interference to enable wide field lower resolution hyperspectral imaging over a wide range of redshifts. We discuss why tunable filters are an important instrument component in future space-based observatories.

Barry, R. K.↗

Holodeck: Telepresence Dome Visualization System Simulations

This paper explores the simulation and consideration of different image-projection strategies for the Holodeck, a dome that will be used for highly immersive telepresence operations in future endeavors of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Its visualization system will include a full 360 degree projection onto the dome's interior walls in order to display video streams from both simulations and recorded video. Because humans innately trust their vision to precisely report their surroundings, the Holodeck's visualization system is crucial to its realism. This system will be rigged with an integrated hardware and software infrastructure-namely, a system of projectors that will relay with a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and computer to both project images onto the dome and correct warping in those projections in real-time. Using both Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and ray-tracing software, virtual models of various dome/projector geometries were created and simulated via tracking and analysis of virtual light sources, leading to the selection of two possible configurations for installation. Research into image warping and the generation of dome-ready video content was also conducted, including generation of fisheye images, distortion correction, and the generation of a reliable content-generation pipeline.

Hite, Nicolas↗

Scalable balanced training of conditional generative adversarial neural networks on image data

Here, we propose a distributed approach to train deep convolutional generative adversarial neural network (DC-CGANs) models. Our method reduces the imbalance between generator and discriminator by partitioning the training data according to data labels, and enhances scalability by performing a parallel training where multiple generators are concurrently trained, each one of them focusing on a single data label. Performance is assessed in terms of inception score, Fréchet inception distance, and image quality on MNIST, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and ImageNet1k datasets, showing a significant improvement in comparison to state-of-the-art techniques to training DC-CGANs. Weak scaling is attained on all the four datasets using up to 1000 processes and 2000 NVIDIA V100 GPUs on the OLCF supercomputer Summit.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Jupiter After the 2009 Impact: Hubble Space Telescope Imaging of the Impact-Generated Debris and Its Temporal Evolution

We report Hubble Space Telescope images of Jupiter during the aftermath of an impact by an unknown object in 2009 July, The 2009 impact-created debris field evolved more slowly than those created in 1994 by the collision of the tidally disrupted comet D/Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL9). The slower evolution, in conjunction with the isolated nature of this single impact, permits a more detailed assessment of the altitudes and meridional motion of the debris than was possible with SL9. The color of the 2009 debris was markedly similar to that seen in 1994, thus this dark debris is likely to be Jovian material that is highly thermally processed. The 2009 impact site differed from the 1994 SL9 sites in UV morphology and contrast lifetime; both are suggestive of the impacting body being asteroidal rather than cometary. Transport of the 2009 Jovian debris as imaged by Hubble shared similarities with transport of volcanic aerosols in Earth's atmosphere after major eruptions.

Hammel, H. B.↗

A Dataset of CFD Simulated Industrial Furnace Images for Conditional Automatic Generation with GANs

The steel industry is constantly looking for ways to automate processes and improve efficiency. A standard practice in industry is to simulate how complex systems will operate before they are actually used. Some complex systems, including steel industry processes such as blast furnaces, require complex physics-based simulations utilizing computational fluid dynamics (CFD). These CFD physics-based simulations are very accurate but can take significant time and computational resources to process, resulting in challenges for the implementation of the models in real-world operational environments. In recent years, deep learning (DL) has been considered as a substitute for these CFD models. DL models can be trained on validated CFD simulation data and then used for industrial process inference. Previous DL-based solutions have made great contributions for industrial automation but are currently missing the additional visualization component that CFD simulations also provide. In this paper, we propose a dataset for simple DL generative approaches that can help to address this issue. The dataset and methodology under development to approach this prediction are discussed in this work.

Calix, Ricardo↗

Digital technique for generating synthetic aperture radar images

This paper describes a digital processing method applicable to a synthetic aperture radar, to be carried by the space shuttle or by satellites. The method uses an earth-fixed coordinate system in which corrective procedures are invoked to compensate for errors introduced by the satellite motion, earth curvature, and wavefront curvature. Among the compensations discussed are those of the coordinate system, skewness, roll, pitch, yaw, earth rotation, and others. The application of a Fast Fourier Transform in the numerical processing of the two-dimensional convolution is discussed in detail.

Van De Lindt, W. J.↗

Real time animation of space plasma phenomena

In pursuit of real time animation of computer simulated space plasma phenomena, the code was rewritten for the Massively Parallel Processor (MPP). The program creates a dynamic representation of the global bowshock which is based on actual spacecraft data and designed for three dimensional graphic output. This output consists of time slice sequences which make up the frames of the animation. With the MPP, 16384, 512 or 4 frames can be calculated simultaneously depending upon which characteristic is being computed. The run time was greatly reduced which promotes the rapid sequence of images and makes real time animation a foreseeable goal. The addition of more complex phenomenology in the constructed computer images is now possible and work proceeds to generate these images.

Jordan, K. F.↗

A Second Generation Multi-Angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR-2)

The Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) has been in Earth orbit since December 1999 on NASA's Terra spacecraft. This instrument provides new ways of looking at the Earth's atmosphere, clouds, and surface for the purpose of understanding the Earth's ecology, environment, and climate. To facilitate the potential future continuation of MISR's multi-angle observations, a study was undertaken in 1999 and 2000 under the Instrument Incubator Program (IIP) of NASA Code Y's Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) to investigate and demonstrate the feasibility of a successor to MISR that will have greatly reduced size and mass. The kernel of the program was the design, construction, and testing of a highly miniaturized camera, one of the nine that would probably be used on a future space borne MISR-like instrument. This demonstrated that the size and mass reduction of the optical system and camera electronics are possible and that filters can be assembled to meet the miniaturized packaging requirements. An innovative, reflective optics design was used, enabling the wavelength range to be extended into the shortwave infrared. This was the smallest all-reflective camera ever produced by the contractor. A study was undertaken to determine the feasibility of implementing nine (multi-angle) cameras within a single structure. This resulted in several possible configurations. It would also be possible to incorporate one of the cameras into an airborne instrument.

spectroradiometers↗

High speed three-dimensional laser scanner with real time processing

A laser scanner computes a range from a laser line to an imaging sensor. The laser line illuminates a detail within an area covered by the imaging sensor, the area having a first dimension and a second dimension. The detail has a dimension perpendicular to the area. A traverse moves a laser emitter coupled to the imaging sensor, at a height above the area. The laser emitter is positioned at an offset along the scan direction with respect to the imaging sensor, and is oriented at a depression angle with respect to the area. The laser emitter projects the laser line along the second dimension of the area at a position where a image frame is acquired. The imaging sensor is sensitive to laser reflections from the detail produced by the laser line. The imaging sensor images the laser reflections from the detail to generate the image frame. A computer having a pipeline structure is connected to the imaging sensor for reception of the image frame, and for computing the range to the detail using height, depression angle and/or offset. The computer displays the range to the area and detail thereon covered by the image frame.

Lavelle, Joseph P.↗

Generating CAHV and CAHVOR Images with Shadows in ROAMS

Part of the Rover Analysis, Modeling and Simulation (ROAMS) software that synthesizes images of terrain has been augmented to make the images more realistic. [ROAMS was described in "Simulating Operation of a Planetary Rover" (NPO-30722), NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 28, No. 9 (September 2004), page 52. ROAMS simulates the operation of a robotic vehicle (rover) exploring terrain on a remote planet.] The images are needed for modeling responses of rover cameras that provide sensory inputs for machine-vision-based algorithms for controlling the motion of the rover. The augmented image-synthesizing part of the ROAMS software supports terrain geometry and texture specifiable by the user, CAHV and CAHVOR camera models, and more-realistic shadowing (see figure). (The letters in "CAHV" represent vectors in a standard photogrammetric model of a pinhole camera. Letters O and R in "CAHVOR" represent vectors used to model distortions.) A contemplated future version of ROAMS would support the CAHVORE model, which represents more-general cameras, including those having fish-eye or other wide-field-of-view lenses. (Letter E in "CAHVORE" represents a vector used to model apparent motion of a camera entrance pupil.)

Madison, Richard↗