With thousands of victims still in the rubble after the
devastating earthquake earlier this month, Haiti's
priority is still search and rescue, but rebuilding is already being planned.
To rebuild Haiti's
capital, Port-au-Prince, the first
step will be to survey the damage, then estimate what is needed for, and where
to start, reconstruction. To aid in that effort, the World Bank has funded a
five-day mission to map the damage, detect any remaining fires, show possible
chemical spills, and identify surface contamination on lakes and ponds.
The technique repurposes a system created by the Rochester
Institute of Technology (RIT) for the U.S. Forest Service to spot wildfires
with high-resolution color cameras and infrared thermal imaging cameras. For
the Haiti
survey, the RIT system has been integrated with a laser range finder (Lidar)
from disaster management specialist ImageCat (Long Beach,
Calif.). By integrating the two systems, a
complete 3D rendering of the devastated area will be possible on a
topographical map. Lidar uses laser pulses to measure 3D depth, which will be
tagged simultaneously with the color and infrared image capturing steps so that
a composite topographical map can be accurately rendered.
The survey is using a Piper Navajo plane operated by aerial
mapping company Kucera International (Lakeland,
Fla.) and outfitted with the color camera,
infrared camera and Lidar range finder. The plane flies at 3,000 feet in a
raster-scan like pattern that covers the entire area affected by the earthquake
in narrow swaths. The imagery is then stitched together into a complete 3D
topographical map with annotations that provide information about the locations
of dangerous hot spots, chemical contaminants, leaking containers and
precarious structures that need to be torn down.
After each pass over the area, the data is uploaded to the
Rochester Institute of Technology, where scientists and graduate students are
working 24/7 at its Information Products Laboratory for Emergency Response
(IPLER)—a partnership between RIT and the University of Buffalo. After
integrating the color, infrared and Lidar depth information into a single
topographical map, the data is being posted online for viewing with the University
of Buffalo's Virtual Disaster
Viewer application. The maps are being hosted by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, the United
Nations, the U.S. Geological Survey and The Earth to Business Company.
The 3D topographical maps will subsequently be used by the
Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Association, the U.S. Geological Survey, and several non-governmental
organizations that will assist with the reconstruction efforts. The U.S. Geological
Survey has also requested that the Lidar system be used to map the fault line to
determine how much it has moved since the quake, which will assist in
estimating the possibility of future earthquakes in the area.
