A New Perspective

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, protected areas and other forms of wilderness areas (e.g., arboretums, beaches, parks, marine monuments) have been closed worldwide. Your challenge is to lead the effort to examine any potential impacts of reduced human traffic in such local protected natural environments.

System of warnings of illegalities in real time through the data of hardware coupled in airplanes.

Summary

Real-time warning system to find violations in natural environments. It captures images close to the ground from airplanes, which are used to carry hardware capable of acquiring more accurate data from the earth's surface. With its satellite communication, we make the processing of this data, centralizing them with the current data. Thus, it will be possible to process them using artificial intelligence to find illegal actions, being able to inform the competent authorities.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Thinking about the difficulty of monitoring movements of people and illegal activities in protection regions and other areas of nature, an artificial intelligence and image detection software was designed that would detect illegal people and activities in these regions and notify the competent authorities, informing details such as the location and activities performed. However, as the satellite images available are not accurate, we designed hardware to improve this situation.

The hardware will be attached to the bottom of commercial or private airplanes taking advantage of its travel, it is formed by a set of cameras and sensors of great precision, capable of generating more accurate images than those of satellites due to its greater proximity to the ground , the system will have no electrical connection on the plane that carries it, as it can be used on a large number of aircraft, using a wind microgenerator to generate the system's energy when in air.

The data acquired by the hardware will be sent to satellites that already have similar objectives, making the hardware on the planes just extensions of the satellites and, as a consequence, concentrate all of that data on existing satellite image detection systems.

Once this data is already stored on the servers, we will use artificial intelligence and image detection software to detect illegal activities and then inform the competent authorities with all the acquired data, such as location and the type of illegal activity for example.

The place we thought about applying this technology was the Atlantic Forest, it is possible because there is a large amount of flights over the remaining forest areas, making the system useful, but this system is valid for many other places that we want to analyze, just check the quantity of commercial flights over the place you want to analyze and see if it is possible, this can be done through the flight plans made available by commercial aviation companies in the region of the environment you want to monitor.

How We Developed This Project

Analyzing the available data and we saw that the satellite images do not have a resolution good enough to identify people in a protected area, this gets even worse when it comes to images in real time.

We then thought about the solution of using a system with sensors and cameras of high resolution and quality coupled in commercial planes, that system would communicate with the satellites, and in turn, the satellites would send this data to the servers on the ground.

Once these data are on the ground, an artificial intelligence algorithm looking for illegal people and activities would be used and thus inform the competent authorities when something unusual is detected.

We use systems such as Earthdata, Black Marble, JAXA Himawari Monitor, aviation sites for studies of air routes, articles on image processing, among others available, that already demonstrate the data on the maps, to verify the resolution of the satellite data, and with this made it possible to verify that they do not have enough resolution to find a person, thus validating the need to use airplanes equipped with hardware linked to these satellites to improve the resolutions of this data.

Due to the complexity and cost of the project, our group had to dedicate most of its activities to theoretical activities such as checking the available data, studies of different sensors, data acquisition techniques using airplanes, studies of airplane routes, study of ways of communications with satellites and etc. Always seeking to write a viable project despite being complex.

Project Demo

https://youtu.be/GRSQWSdlF5k

Data & Resources

Blackmarble.gsfc.nasa.gov. 2020. NASA's Black Marble. [online] Available at: <https://blackmarble.gsfc.nasa.gov/> [Accessed 31 May 2020].

Earthdata.nasa.gov. 2020. Earthdata. [online] Available at: <https://earthdata.nasa.gov/> [Accessed 31 May 2020].

Eorc.jaxa.jp. 2020. JAXA 第一宇宙技術部門 地球観測研究センター(EORC). [online] Available at: <https://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/> [Accessed 31 May 2020].

Apps.sentinel-hub.com. 2020. Dashboard. [online] Available at: <https://apps.sentinel-hub.com/> [Accessed 31 May 2020].

Skyvector.com. 2020. Skyvector: Flight Planning / Aeronautical Charts. [online] Available at: <https://skyvector.com/> [Accessed 31 May 2020].

2020. [online] Available at: <https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/digital_products/aero_guide/media/editions/cug-ifr-enroute-edition.pdf> [Accessed 31 May 2020].

Flightradar24. 2020. Live Flight Tracker - Real-Time Flight Tracker Map | Flightradar24. [online] Available at: <https://www.flightradar24.com/> [Accessed 31 May 2020].

Iflightplanner.com. 2020. Flight Planning & Online Logbook | Iflightplanner. [online] Available at: <https://www.iflightplanner.com/> [Accessed 31 May 2020].

People.cs.georgetown.edu. 2020. [online] Available at: <http://people.cs.georgetown.edu/~maloof/cosc270.f17/cosc270-intro-handout.pdf> [Accessed 31 May 2020].

L'Avion Jaune. 2020. Cartographie Aérienne - LIDAR - Photogrammétrie - Drone - L'avion Jaune. [online] Available at: <http://www.lavionjaune.com/en/accueil-2/> [Accessed 31 May 2020].

Infratec.eu. 2020. Aerial Thermography. [online] Available at: <https://www.infratec.eu/thermography/industries-applications/aerial-thermography/> [Accessed 31 May 2020].

YellowScan. 2020. Mining - Yellowscan. [online] Available at: <https://www.yellowscan-lidar.com/applications/mining/> [Accessed 31 May 2020].

Wingtra. 2020. Drone Photogrammetry Vs. LIDAR: What Sensor To Choose For A Given Application | Wingtra. [online] Available at: <https://wingtra.com/drone-photogrammetry-vs-lidar/> [Accessed 31 May 2020].

Tags
#ComputerVision #WorldGreen #SafeForest #HomeSweetHome
Global Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Global Judging process.